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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
- Path: sparky!uunet!munnari.oz.au!uniwa!bilby.cs.uwa.oz.au!dunnart!janet
- From: janet@cs.uwa.oz.au (Janet Jackson)
- Subject: A bug in init? (booting single-user)
- Message-ID: <janet.721386869@dunnart>
- Summary: Pressing Return at Password: prompt gets you multi-user startup!
- Sender: usenet@bilby.cs.uwa.edu.au
- Nntp-Posting-Host: dunnart
- Organization: Dept. Computer Science, University of Western Australia.
- Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 09:14:29 GMT
- Lines: 36
-
- The environment: SPARCstation or Sun-4 running SunOS4.1.1. Various kernel
- and other patches. init has not been patched.
-
- What I think may be a bug manifests itself when the system is trying
- to boot single-user and is prompting for the root password.
-
- If I type the root password, it runs a single-user shell, as it should.
- If I type some rubbish, it repeats the prompt, as it should.
- But if I just press Return, it does a multi-user startup!
-
- This happens whether it is booting single-user because I asked it to,
- or because fsck has failed.
-
- It happens whether it is prompting for the root password because the console
- is not marked "secure" in /etc/ttytab, or because issecure() returns true
- (the latter happens because the system is running Sun password shadowing).
-
- It happens on my systems, and on a colleague's downstairs.
-
- Does anyone know:
-
- Is this a bug? In init? Has it been reported to Sun?
- Is it fixed in 4.1.2? .3? Solaris?
-
- If it isn't a bug, what's the explanation?
-
- Is there any way to prevent this behaviour?
-
- (I found out about this when fsck failed, and a user thought it wouldn't
- hurt to press Return. The system didn't stay up for long. Sigh.)
-
- Janet Jackson
- <janet@cs.uwa.edu.au>
- Systems Administrator
- Department of Computer Science
- The University of Western Australia
-