https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=293060
Bug ID: 293060
Summary: _PATH_RLOGIN is outdated
Product: Base System
Version: CURRENT
Hardware: Any
OS: Any
Status: New
Severity: Affects Some People
Priority: ---
Component: misc
Assignee: [email protected]
Reporter: [email protected]
By way of context, for those that may not remember, the Berkeley "r" commands
(rlogin/rsh/rcp) were early networking utilities that allowed users to login
into, execute commands on, and copy files to and from, remote machines. They
used per-user and per-host configuration files to determine whether access was
permitted or not, and relied on the client being able to access privileged
("reserved") TCP ports to prevent spoofing (see `rcmd(3)`). As such, they were
not particularly secure, and once SSH became available and ubiquitous, quickly
fell out of favor. They were removed from the FreeBSD base distribution many
years ago.
However, for connecting to old systems on closed networks, they can be handy
(at least, the clients, if not the servers), and so there is a package for them
in ports.
Unfortunately, that package relies on symbols from <paths.h> (`_PATH_RLOGIN`,
specifically) that is still refers to their old pathnames from the 4.4BSD days.
The `rsh` ("remote shell") program, for example, is intended for executing
commands on a remote system, but invoked with no command specified, it will
instead exec "rlogin" locally, allowing one to login to a remote host by
typing, "rsh host". But this fails since the package attempts to `argv[0] =
"rlogin"; execv(_PATH_RLOGIN, argv);`.
This is easy enough to work around in the port
(https://github.com/jlehen/bsdrcmds/pull/2), but that symbol, along with
_PATH_RSH and _PATH_RCP, should probably be removed from the base system. I
would argue that the `rcmd` et al library functions should probably also be
removed, or at least moved out of libc and into a compatibility library
(possibly provided by the port) if not.
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