[464] in Moira
Re: honor: mailmaint
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (andrew j. cassidy)
Tue Sep 29 16:16:00 1992
To: Mark Rosenstein <mar@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bug-moira@Athena.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of Wed, 23 Sep 92 11:41:56 -0400.
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 92 16:15:17 EDT
From: "andrew j. cassidy" <honor@Athena.MIT.EDU>
=> Date: Tue, 22 Sep 92 18:15:17 EDT
=> From: "andrew j. cassidy" <honor@Athena.MIT.EDU>
=>
=> => As to your first report that mailmaint didn't know who you were: I
=> => have no idea what the problem was, and I can't reproduce it. If you
=> => ever have that happen again, *in the same xterm* try "whoami" and see
=> => if that can find your username. I expect that your session was messed
=> => up somehow and this wasn't really a mailmaint problem.
=>
=> Ok, I figured out what this one is caused by. I set the following
=> resource for my xterms:
=>
=> XTerm*utmpInhibit: true
=>
=> If I start an xterm with the +ut option to override this resource,
=> mailmaint knows who I am.
=>
=> --andrew cassidy
=> honor@athena.mit.edu
=>
=> It's not that simple. I use xterm from the X11R5 locker which also
=> inhibits writing to utmp. But mailmaint still knows who I am.
=>
=> Mailmaint uses the getlogin() library call, which gets the uid of the
=> process, then looks that uid up in the password file. Were you su'ed
=> to another user, or was your password file corrupt?
=> -Mark
ok, then I'll try to give more info.
I hadn't su'ed (although in the following example you'll see that I
did an hft login as root--this was for unrelated reasons), and the
password file looked alright to me.
I use xterm from the packs (/usr/athena/bin/xterm). As I mentioned, I
have no probs when I start xterm with the +ut option. On a dec (and I
can repeat this consistently), if I start xterm without extra
command-line options, mailmaint from that xterm won't recognize me as
honor. Additionally, if I start an xterm on an rs6k without any extra
command-line options, and run mailmaint on in that xterm, mailmaint
usually thinks I'm somebody else. Example: right now I'm logged on to
an rs6k (air-traffic-controller), and mailmaint thinks I'm user "gio".
The startup message is "Connecting ... for gio", and the top line is
"Mail List Program for gio". "last | head -5" shows:
root hft/2 Tue Sep 29 16:03 still logged in
honor pts/1 unix:0.0 Tue Sep 29 13:59 still logged in
dougie pts/0 unix:0.0 Tue Sep 29 13:45 - 13:59 (00:13)
gio pts/1 unix:0.0 Tue Sep 29 13:40 - 13:41 (00:01)
gio pts/0 unix:0.0 Tue Sep 29 13:38 - 13:39 (00:01)
--andy
