On Sun, May 26, 2002 at 12:13:19PM +0100, Chris Evans wrote:
> One concern is the large(ish) quantity of sgid utmp programs out there. A
> few distributions use sgid xterm/screen instead of utempter. When
> xterm/xlib hole #7,129 comes out, these distributions tend to say "don't
> worry - we only ship xterm sgid utmp not suid root". That's not looking
> like such a good claim any more...

Agreed. What about a daemon that maintains the utmp table rather
than each silly application doing it on its own? Something along
the lines of

        while (1) {
                sleep a while
                scan /dev/pts
                if (changed)
                        rebuild utmp file
        }

This will do the trick for all xterm/screen type applications because
they don't need to set any fancy fields like ut_host anyway. The only
minor challenge should be finding out the pid of the process having
opened the pty.

Olaf

-- 
Olaf Kirch        |  Anyone who has had to work with X.509 has probably
okircaldera.de   |  experienced what can best be described as
------------------+  ISO water torture. -- Peter Gutmann

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