A Brief Summary (was: How do I fix this mile wide security hole?)

[Chin Fang]

In article <7264 at awdprime.UUCP> ... at cs.utexas.edu:ibmaus!auschs!leopard.austin.ibm.com!frank writes:

>> I wrote:
>> Up to now, I just log out completely to protect my account, a BIG hassle
>> indeed considering we have 9600! users in yp, and it takes more than 30s
>> to get passwd prompt after login prompt!
>
>Look at the mkpasswd command.  It makes a faster password lookup possible.
>
NO! It won't!  My head SA, Dennis Micheal, has found some bugs in the tcp/ip
package.  He has informed IBM his findings.  This morning he told me that 
IBM promised him that an official fix would be available soon. 

Once this fix becomes available, sites with HUGE yp passwd file should have
significant speed up in login response. 

I take this oppounity to thank all people (mostly from IBM) who told me about 
the -T switch for X for disabling <Alt><Cntl><Bksp>.

I guess my only excuse is that on our server the hd containing info 
database and man pgs was crashed.  So up to now, I have been unable to RTFM.

Anyway, with open xinit -T in a start up script, and the following in system
mwmrc:

"Quit X"	f.exec "(set Target=`xlswins|grep Console`;xkill -id \
                         $Target[1]) &"

now I can even fake a "semi-graceful" exit of X for general users and everyone
can xlock her/his console too.

However, if anyone has a more elagent solution.  Please email me.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Chin Fang
Mechanical Engineering Department
Stanford University
fangchin at leland.stanford.edu