utmp update for bsd systems (try 2)

[David Lee]

On Tue, 19 Apr 2005, Luke Mewburn wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 18, 2005 at 06:48:29AM -0400, Michael Shalayeff wrote:
>  | Making, drinking tea and reading an opus magnum from David Lee:
>  | > On Sat, 16 Apr 2005, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
>  | > Use of the higher-level subroutines ("pututline()", "login()" etc.), where
>  | > provided by the OS, certainly seems preferable.  For one thing, it should
>  | > (assuming no bugs!) manage locking, in a consistent fashion, of the
>  | > underlying utmp/wtmp database files.  (Imagine two or more simultaneous
>  | > connects or disconnects of any entities (ftpd, telnetd, sshd, smbd, ...)
>  | > which try to update those database files.)
>  |
>  | those interfaces do not exist in *bsd.
>  | login/logout is unusable as well and it is explained
>  | in the comments in my diff WHY
>
> login(3) and logout(3) certainly exist in NetBSD's libutil, and NetBSD
> has had them since inception (March 1993).  FreeBSD has them.
> OpenBSD should have them as NetBSD had them at the time OpenBSD forked
> from NetBSD, unless they've since been removed.
>
> With the addition of utmpx(5) support in NetBSD a couple of years ago,
> NetBSD also provides loginx(3), logout(x) and logwtmpx(3) APIs in
> libutil, as well as the POSIX pututxline(3) (et al) API in libc.
>
> autoconf tests can be used to detect which particular utmp/wtmp/utmpx/wtmpx
> APIs are present and working on a given system so that Samba can DTRT.

Thanks, Luke.

Michael says "login/logout is unusable" (which I cannot assess either 
way).  Alas, the comments in his diff don't say why.

Luke: Do you have the inclination, time and resources to investigate 
whether a subroutine-based solution ("login()", "pututxline()") might be 
feasible on one or more of the *BSD variants?  (And, as a side-effect, 
checking whether the autoconf tests are adequate and sufficient?)

Further, in hunting through the "www.opensbd.org" CVS repository 
yesterday, I also found a "pam_lastlog", which looked promising.  At his 
point we need Andrew Bartlett again.

Andrew: I have a recollection (probably at least partially faulty) that 
your preferred solution to all this session related stuff is PAM (when 
available and when modules permit), falling back to "utmp.c:pututxline()", 
falling back to "utmpc.c:write()".  Comments?

-- 

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