Suresh Ramasubramanian forced the electrons to say:
> you have to patch mingetty.c as binand pointed out. /etc/issue will give you
> the "banner" over the login.
Taking it up - a description of the linux login process, and files
accessed.
When the system boots up, init runs mingetty on all the virtual consoles
defined in /etc/inittab. When invoked, mingetty dumps the following
in order onto the console:
a) contents of the file /etc/issue (path hardcoded in the source) after
translating certain backslash escapes (a list available in mingetty(8)),
b) the machine's name (fullname if the command line switch --long-hostname
is given), and
c) the "login: " prompt.
Once a user types the login name, mingetty invokes /bin/login with
that username as the parameter. The "Password: " prompt that follows
is printed by /bin/login. If the login fails, then further "login:
" prompts are printed by /bin/login, and not mingetty, till maximum
login attempts are reached, when /bin/login terminates, and mingetty
gets control of the console again. If no login name is given, mingetty goes
through the whole process again.
/bin/login does various things, for example it checks /etc/securetty
for root logins, /etc/nologin for sysadmins disabling login attempts,
$HOME/.hushlogin for silent logins (if that file does not exist, then
login will dump the contents of /etc/motd on the screen). Finally, if
everything is ok, login records the user in the utmp and wtmp files and
invokes the user's shell (as defined in /etc/passwd) and waits for the
shell to terminate.
So, to the OP's query, you not only have to patch mingetty, but also
the login program as well to get a consistent login prompt.
Binand
PS: This is no way complete - linux login program is pam aware and can
do many more things, if the proper pam configuration file exists.
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