Login Shell for Remote Logins Under 4.1?, 4.2 BSD (re-posted)

[donn at sdchema.UUCP]

[This is part of a batch of articles from San Diego that the rest of
the net never saw, because our net connection was down -- sorry if you
have seen this before, or if the discussion seems dated.]

Date: Fri, 4-Nov-83 12:08:21 PST

This kind of announcement should really go on net.available, the
converse of net.wanted...

I have a trivial program called 'remlogin' that has proved to be rather
useful which other people on the net may be interested in.  This
program allows a user to approach any terminal on a local network, type
in the name of a computer, and then log in to that computer (using
'rlogin').  This makes it unnecessary for the user to possess an
account on the machine to which the terminal is connected.  The program
was designed to provide a capability of our late unlamented terminal
multiplexor which is not currently available under 4.1a (and 4.2?)
BSD.  It also handles an accounting problem: a user is only charged
for connect time on the remote machine -- connect time on the local
machine is charged to a local account named the same as the remote
host.  Access to particular remote hosts can be controlled from the
local host in at least two ways: the local host may not provide a
login for a remote host, or it may require a password to access the
remote host.

The program works by acting as the shell for a user with the same name
as the remote host; it prints a banner appropriate to the host (using
the 'gecos' field of the password file), prompts the user for their
login name, and executes 'rlogin <host> -e<non-ascii> -l <user>'.  The
terminal type is found in the local 'ttytype' file and is passed along
to the remote host.  It would be simple to modify the program to run as
a generic remote login and prompt the user for a remote host, although
we have not done so in order to keep the accounting simple.

If you are interested in the program, send me mail.  If there is lots
of interest then I may post the sources...

[Since this article was written, I have found that Berkeley does this
with a shell script!  I think my program is better (naturally), but
I can also post the shell script if people are interested.]

Donn Seeley    UCSD Chemistry Dept. RRCF    ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn
32 52' 30"N 117 14' 25"W  (619) 452-4016    sdcsvax!sdchema!donn at noscvax