I've never met Hunter, but I will say I've used MGLOGIN, replaced by
HGLOGIN, and it has been very useful. I've also used CONTRL, PEEK &
SPY, and SUPERVISE. All of these have worked without problems.
In the early 90's, I did try to use WATCH a few times, but it seems like
it generally crashed the system, and not just when I tried to use it.
I appreciate Hunter's contributions to the VMS community.
On 3/25/2020 8:27 AM, Hunter Goatley wrote:
On 3/25/2020 10:03 AM, Hittner, David T [US] (MS) wrote:
For a while, there was a company selling a SPY utility for VMS, as
well as freebie versions floating around. The commercial version
allowed the watcher to enter data in the watched session by using a
special command sequence to enable remote data entry. I don’t recall
any of the freebie versions ever allowing data entry from the
watcher, for fairly obvious security reasons.
Clyde Digital Systems had AUDIT and CONTRL that let you do that (AUDIT
logged, CONTRL let an admin watch and/or take over a terminal
session). Networking Dynamics had PEEK and SPY, which were competing
products.
I should say "has." Networking Dynamics still sells PEEK & SPY, and
Raxco still sells AUDIT and CONTRL.
I worked for Clyde Digital.
There was a freeware program called WATCH. It did not allow for taking
over a session, just watching it. Or maybe it did allow it and was
just so buggy that you were advised not to.
Then there was the Supervisor Series, sold by Precision Data Systems.
They were later acquired by Security Pacific Software Services. In
1992, they released the Supervisor Series into the public domain. At
that point, I took it over, added features, fixed bugs, and maintained
it as the Supervisor Series freeware project.
I maintained that for several years, but due to the litigious nature
of yet another company with competing products, I never ported the
Supervisor Series to Alpha (which means it was never ported to
Itanium, either).
The Supervisor Series still runs on OpenVMS VAX V5.0 or later. You can
find it here:
http://vms.process.com/scripts/fileserv/fileserv_search.exe?package=supervisor&description=&author=&system=Either&language=All&RD=&RM=&RY=
There was also another highly privileged program on the DECUS tapes,
GLOGIN, which allowed a privileged user to login as another user, so
that you could see what application behavior occurred within the
context of a specific user. I found a weird bug in one of our
application programs that only occurred when the username was
_exactly_ 7 characters long using GLOGIN to login as the user who had
reported the bug that we couldn’t duplicate ourselves. J
The original GLOGIN used the pseudo-terminal routines that used to
float around. When DEC added the supported PTD$ routines for pseudo
terminals, I wrote my own version of that called HGLOGIN. Here's part
of the readme:
HGLOGIN lets privileged users log in to a named account without
having to know the password for that account. A process running
under the target username is created. Its input and output are
read from a pseudo-terminal, which is controlled by HGLOGIN.
Unlike BECOME and SWAP, the process created by HGLOGIN is a full
process, with all the privileges, rights identifiers, quotas, DCL
symbols, logical names, etc., as well as anything else that is set
up in the target user's LOGIN.COM.
BECOME and SWAP were two other kernel-mode programs that modified the
username and UIC of the running process to be some other user. They
were handy, but they had kernel-mode code and they didn't change
quotas, etc. HGLOGIN was also much safer to use, as it used a
documented interface provided by VMS.
HGLOGIN is also available in my freeware archive. It runs on all
platforms, but requires whatever version of VMS introduced the PTD$
routines.
http://vms.process.com/scripts/fileserv/fileserv_search.exe?package=hglogin&description=&author=&system=Either&language=All&RD=&RM=&RY=
If you're not familiar with my VMS freeware archive:
http://www.process.com/resources/openvms/index.html
--
Hunter
------
Hunter Goatley, Process Software,http://www.process.com/
goathun...@goatley.com http://hunter.goatley.com/
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