[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#505071: Bug#505071: login tty mis-determination (see bug#332198)

[Nicolas François]

Hello,

First of all, this issue was already discussed, and the main problem was
that we were not able to reproduce it.
Are you currently able to reproduce it?

That would help us a lot, since this would allow testing instrumentation
of login to find the root cause.

Would you agree testing some patches?

On Sun, Nov 09, 2008 at 06:26:39PM +1100, psz at maths.usyd.edu.au wrote:
> Package: login
> Version: 1:4.0.18.1-7
> Severity: normal
> 
> (I wanted to send this to  332198 at bugs.debian.org  but that was not
> accepted, surely because that is closed/archived.)
> 
> I found in my logs (I think first occurrence of such mis-behaviour):
> 
> Nov  8 05:50:09 rome in.telnetd[21060]: connect from psz at bari.maths.usyd.edu.au (129.78.69.145) 
> Nov  8 05:50:12 rome login[21062]: (pam_unix) session opened for user root by (uid=0) 
> Nov  8 05:50:12 rome login[21062]: can't stat(`/dev/smb/39'): errno 2  
> Nov  8 05:50:12 rome login[21062]: unable to determine TTY name, got /dev/smb/39  
> 
> Surely that Samba device is wrong for a telnet session...

You logged in with telnet, right?

Do you know the version of telnet you are using?
Do you know if telnet creates a utmp entry before calling login?

What might be happening is that telnet do not create a utmp entry, and an
old one from samba is reused (in checkutmp). This should be very rare also
because the bug would occur only if the same pid is reused. 

Best Regards,
-- 
Nekral