[1975] in Release_7.7_team
Consider eliminating X terminal support in xdm.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Tue Nov 2 19:54:52 1999
Message-ID: <0s7sTGMGgE6e07LXc0@mit.edu>
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 19:54:42 -0500 (EST)
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: owls@MIT.EDU
CC: release-team@MIT.EDU, source-developers@MIT.EDU
Naomi:
This looks like an appropriate discusison topic for Owls:
Consider eliminating X terminal support in xdm.
We are doing maintenance on the sources which implement the xlogin
family of programs, which includes a modified xdm for X terminals. The
modified xdm is a service which has never worked particularly well and
has always been insecure--using it involves sending passwords over the
net in the clear. With password sniffing on MITnet becoming more and
more common, we'd like to desupport it rather than renovating it along
with the rest of the xlogin suite.
By scanning machines, we found exactly one current site using this
service. When they were contacted, they indicated that they had stopped
using it but didn't know how to turn it off.
We'd like to know if any Owls folks know about people using "mkserv
xterm" such that we might not have found out about it. We don't want to
decomission an actively used service, but this one looks moribund.
-wdc
(Text supplied by kcr and ghudson)
