[comp.sys.next] What modifies /etc/utmp?

wiml@milton.u.washington.edu (William Lewis) (05/06/91)

|In article <1991Apr8.191201.3255@daffy.cs.wisc.edu> sparkie@picard.cs.wisc.edu (Mark J. Horn) writes:
|I've been having some unix problems on my '030 cube running NS 2.0.  The
|problem _was_ that when I logged in to my machine and opened up Terminal
|and did a "who" I only got the following:
|
|uhura> who
|sparkie  console Apr  8 12:46
|uhura>
|
|This is obviosly wrong, since I was using ttyp1 with Terminal.  Well, I noticed
|that if I did the same thing as root I didn't have this problem:
|
|uhura# who
|root     console Apr  8 12:32
|root     ttyp1   Apr  8 12:35   (uhura)
|uhura# 
|
|This is what I expected to get the first time.  Well it seemed apparant that
|I wasn't able to write to /etc/utmp file.  So I changed it to be world
|writeable and that made things work.  The problem is that this is not the way
|it ought to be done.  On every other unix machine I've used something like
|/bin/login is setuid root and this takes care of adding an entry to utmp.  On
|my next /bin/login IS setuid root, but it still doesn't work.  

    I'm not sure, but I think /bin/login isn't being run. When you login
on the console, your login goes through loginwindow, which probably
updates the utmp entry for console. But when you start up a new 
shell window, you don't log in again, and you don't run /bin/login,
so /etc/utmp doesn't get updated. I'm not sure why it *does* get updated
when you log in as root...
    You might be able to fix this by taking just the utmp-modifying code
from login's sources (any bsd sources should do) and putting it in
your .login/.cshrc, and something to take it out in your .logout
(I'm not sure which program has the task of removing utmp entries
under conventional tty based unix ... ) This is more or less a hack, 
though.


-- 
 wiml@milton.acs.washington.edu       Seattle, Washington   
     (William Lewis)   |  47 41' 15" N   122 42' 58" W  
 "Just remember, wherever you go ... you're stuck there."

ta-aca@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Andrew C. Athan) (05/06/91)

> [utmp not being updated when I open new windows...]

Are you using Terminal or Stuart?  If you are using Stuart ... have you
setuid'ed Stuart?  This will do the trick.


aca


// Email:  ta-aca@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu   OR   athan@cs.columbia.edu