topic Re: @ not registering as a valid character upon login in Operating System - HP-UX

@ not registering as a valid character upon login

uk1 — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:00:56 GMT

Interesting problem. All symbols outside of @ register as a vaild character for a users password. However @ returns a null. Has anyone here experience a similar problem in the past?

Re: @ not registering as a valid character upon login

James R. Ferguson — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:10:06 GMT

Hi David:

The characters like "@" are special to 'getty'. Type:

# stty -a

...to see what mappings you have.

See also, the manpages for 'getty'.

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: @ not registering as a valid character upon login

Victor Fridyev — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:10:54 GMT

Correct,

RTFM for passwd
WARNING
Avoid password characters which have special meaning to the tty
driver, such as # (erase) and @ (kill). You may not be able to login
with these characters.

HTH

Re: @ not registering as a valid character upon login

Pete Randall — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:11:12 GMT

I expect that the @ sign in a login name would suffer the same problems it does when used in a password. From "man passwd":

WARNINGS
Avoid password characters which have special meaning to the tty driver, such as # (erase) and @ (kill). You may not be able to login with these characters.

Pete

Re: @ not registering as a valid character upon login

Rodney Hills — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:11:55 GMT

The "@" by default is the "erase" key. If you execute the following-
stty erase ^h
Then all new logins will use backspace for "erase" key. Thus "@" will be a regular character.

You may want to put that command as part of your HPUX startup process.

HTH

-- Rod Hills

Re: @ not registering as a valid character upon login

Rodney Hills — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:15:05 GMT

To update my stty command suggestion. I have the following in a startup script under /sbin/init.d -

stty erase '^H' kill '^U' intr '^C' susp '^Z'
Rod Hills

Re: @ not registering as a valid character upon login

uk1 — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:22:16 GMT

Ok i guess I get docked for not reading the manual on this one. Sorry guys, sometimes the forums are a easy out. None the less, I do appericate all the responses.

Re: @ not registering as a valid character upon login

A. Clay Stephenson — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:24:39 GMT

You are also required to "unstar" your profile in this area as punishment for not bothering to read the man pages.

Re: @ not registering as a valid character upon login

Tom Danzig — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 16:21:35 GMT

FYI, you can get this to work by escaping the '@' by preceeding it with a backslash.

Also, the password will probably work as is (with the '@') on the console as the '@' has a different meaning there.

Re: @ not registering as a valid character upon login

Bill Hassell — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 17:24:09 GMT

The @ and # characters were historically used as KILL (cancel current line) and ERASE (erase previous character) when the console was a teletypewriter (see man termio). These are normally changed after you login to CTRL-C and backspace respectively. Similarly, the default baud rate for a serial port is 300 baud, all of which haven't changed sing the mid-1980's. The good news is that with patches for 10.x and 11.x, the new tty default config devicefile now exists (/dev/ttyconf) and as mentioned above, these (archaic) settings can now be overidden. It's easier to use ttyconf than to educate users...