Debugging login (Re: Forging E-mail from root to get users to change passwords)

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#484

From: Bennet Yee
Date: Sat, 07 Nov 1992 17:41

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In article <id.Z9RU.L6K@ferranti.com>, peter@ferranti.com (peter da silva) writes:
>In article <ratner.720811773@ficus.cs.ucla.edu> ratner@ficus.cs.ucla.edu (Dave "Van Damme" Ratner) writes:
>> Yes, it is true that root never needs to know a user's password ---
>> root can always su to the user without knowing the password.
>
>Not if root is trying to debug a problem in login or rlogin where the user's
>password is entered. I had one case where a user's password included a pound
>sign... which worked fine on the Suns but he couldn't login on Xenix for some
>reason.

The reason is that on some systems, the default erase/kill characters
are #/@ which is behavior left over from the days when Unix had real
teletypes as terminals.  Not a bug in login at all -- the tty driver
just had different defaults.

-bsy

-- 
Bennet S. Yee		Phone: +1 412 268-7571		Email: bsy+@cs.cmu.edu
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890

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From: bsy+@CS.CMU.EDU (Bennet Yee)
Newsgroups: comp.security.misc
Subject: Debugging login (Re: Forging E-mail from root to get users to change passwords)
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Date: 7 Nov 92 17:41:28 GMT
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