David Boyes wrote:
> I'm not sure there's anything they *can* do. The guest doesn't see the
> input until the attention key gets pressed, so that it really doesn't
> get control in any useful way.
>
> You might be able to do something with a 3270 console, but that's
> probably unlikely to be useful in a VM environment (spare us VINPUT,
> please!).
>
> It would be a lot easier to configure (and probably more useful to have)
> a root shell to always be running on the console without a Unix login
> required. Since you already have a authorization method in place (the VM
> userid login) that does password suppression correctly, that would be
> the "right" thing to do -- after all, if you have the VM userid
> password, you can already do all the harm that a root user can do, and
> you have secure logging of the fact that the login occurred.

You know, linux can use serial ports as a console device...  So why
hasn't IBM come up with a virtual serial port type of console system to
use instead?  Something like having the console on /dev/ttyS0, and that
via some z/VM magic, is available on an IP as a port number.  Telnet to
the port, and Linux's getty takes it from there.  Or better yet, through
some z/VM magic, the serial ports could be mapped to another Linux
host's serial ports, say one set up as a console appliance... Then that
appliance could be configured to allow access to them in a variety of
ways, whether it be by port numbers, account names, ssh key, whatever.

I've been imagining this for a long time now, and just wondered why IBM
never did it.

*Brandon Darbro

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