rlogin (and/or /bin/login) under SCO Xenix and TCP/IP

[Luc Rooijakkers]

In <779 at tiamat.fsc.com> jim at tiamat.fsc.com (Jim O'Connor) writes:

>In article <1991Jan13.000706.15034 at cjbsys.bdb.com>, cliffb at cjbsys.bdb.com (cliff bedore) writes:
>> 
>> It's broken on mine also.  I have inserted the following line in my .login
>> which at least offers me my favorite terminal if the system doesn't know what
>> the terminal is.
>> 
>> 
>> set term = (`tset -m ansi:ansi -m :\?ansi -r -S -I -Q`)

>I had something in all my .profile's (I'm a ksh user), which is my I never
>noticed the problem.  Recently, though, we started thinking about
>letting more of our non-programming users (i.e. secretaries, VP's,
>QC technicians, etc) take advantage of network logins for certain
>applications, and it was during the testing phase that I discovered it.
>Since we usually try to not make these type of users have to deal with
>such things as setting terminals types, I'm hoping there's a way
>to fix this.

There is a way to fix this on SCO UNIX; this may apply to SCO XENIX
as well (I haven't tested it there). What happens is that (on SCO UNIX
at least) rlogind passed the correct TERM environment variable to the
login shell, but it is ignored by tset (which you probably have somewere
in /etc/profile). The secret is hidden in a paragraph in the manual
entry of tset, which says something like

     When no arguments are specified,  tset  reads  the  terminal
     type  from  the TERM environment variable and re-initializes
     the terminal, and performs initialization of mode, environ-
     ment and other options at login time to determine the termi-
     nal type and set up terminal modes.

(this is from the SunOS manuals, but the XENIX manuals say something
similar). What I found out was that the inclusion of any terminal type
*argument* or -m *option* causes tset to ignore TERM and use
/etc/ttytype.

Thus, what I did was to do all the fancy mapping stuff only if the user
was not logging in from a pseudo tty (i.e., if `tty` did not match
/dev/ttyp*). This fixed it for our case (Sequent rlogin to SCO UNIX).

NB. It is sometimes helpful in cases like this to include a 'set'
command in /etc/profile, to see what is coming in and who destroys it.

Hope this helps.

--
Luc Rooijakkers                                 Internet: lwj at cs.kun.nl
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science     UUCP: uunet!cs.kun.nl!lwj
University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands         tel. +3180652271