telnet and login

[Kevin P. Kleinfelter]

I'm writing a program very similar to telnet. It creates a pseudo-tty and
then forks itself, with one process handling I/O over my network, and the other
process will execl /bin/login. The idea is that /bin/login's /dev/tty
is at one end of the pseudo-tty, and my other process is at the other end,
simply passing I/O over my network.

The trouble is that login tells me that I must execute it from a top-level
shell.  I've tried running this program from inittab  (so its parent will
be init).  That doesn't help.  I've tried reversing the processes, so that
the login process had been tried as parent and as child.


I can always write my own version of login, but that seems inappropriate.
(This maybe should be in comp.unix.programmer, but I think that they would
know little about TSM on AIX.)

How does telnet convince TSM/login to run?
-- 
Kevin Kleinfelter @ Dun and Bradstreet Software, Inc (404) 239-2347
{emory,gatech}!nanovx!msa3b!kevin

Look closely at the return address.  It is nanovx and NOT nanovAx.