begin quoting Tracy R Reed as of Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 02:07:43PM -0800: > On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 12:26:59PM -0800, Stewart Stremler spake thusly: > > Ought not the operating system provide you with a way to always > > get a known-good-to-you login-prompt? Some way that user-code cannot > > intercept, detect, or redirect? > > And Linux does. alt-sysrq-k kills any programms running on the terminal > allowing the system to start up a fresh known-good login prompt for you.
I stand corrected! Not really a nice key combination (I don't even know /how/ to invoke sysrq on my current keyboard -- it's listed as PSc/SRq). But that's just quibbling. (I would have said just use sysrq, or possibly control-sysrq if a single-key was deemed unsafe.) > > that this was a risk, and repurposed control-alt-delete to fulfill the > > task of bringing forth a known-good component of the operating system. > > I have always thought ctrl-alt-del was a bad choice. That is traditionally > used for rebooting the system. You don't want users hitting that key > sequence on every computer they walk up to because occasionally they will > cause systems to reboot. I emphatically agree that control-alt-delete was a poor choice. There was a lot of grief from folks trying out OS/2 when they forgot that OS/2 uses control-alt-delete to "reboot now, I mean it". > > Ideally, we'd have a "login" key on the keyboard that would be > > intercepted by the operating system and never *seen* by user-code. > > That's what alt-sysrq-k is. No, alt-sysrq-k is not a "login key" -- it's horrible *choice* of key-combination (and if I don't write it down, I will likely forget it in a matter of days, if not hours). > > -Stewart "Been a long time since I last wrote a login-emulator" Stremler > > Your 5kr1p7 k1ddy days are long past eh? Heh. It was a proof-of-principle thing, and totally un-needed, as there was always a terminal or three unattended and logged in, just waiting for a "chsh ksh" or a little script to alias everything in /bin to 'echo "You are not authorized to use that command!"' on login. -Stewart "alt-sysrq-k, alt-sysrq-kay, alt-sisrq-kay, alt-sis-wreck-kay" Stremler -- KPLUG-List mailing list [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
