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Interaction between mgetty and other programs

Normally, after a caller enters his login name, mgetty calls /bin/login to do the password checking and system login.

In some special cases, you may want to call other programs instead of /bin/login. For example, you could want to call /usr/lib/uucp/uucico -L <username> for all login names starting with `U*' (to have uucico do the authentication, works only with taylor uucp 1.05 or taylor uucp 1.04 with my patch in `patches/taylor.p1'), or /usr/lib/fnet/ifcico for incoming FidoNet calls (using ifcico from Eugene Crosser's `ifmail' package).

mgetty can do all this. It's controlled by a configuration file `login.config', normally located in `/usr/local/etc/mgetty+sendfax/' (definition LOGIN_CFG_FILE in `policy.h'). I have provided a sample file with lots of comments, please look into that file for the syntax to use. To make mgetty understand incoming fido calls, you have to compile it with -DFIDO.

If you are worrying about security, you can also use this mechanism: just call /bin/login only for trusted, known users, and /bin/false for every other login name - so, only those listed in `login.config' will be able to log in.

This mechanism can also be used to automatically start up a PPP server if an incoming client sends PPP packets. This feature is called AutoPPP. For it to work, you have to compile mgetty with -DAUTO_PPP (added to CFLAGS in Makefile). After this, mgetty will detect incoming PPP packets, and run the program that is specified in `login.config' by the special user name "/AutoPPP/". See the sample `login.config' file for an example.

Which options should be specified depends on your PPP server program and your local setup. Don't ask me about that -- I wouldn't know. Instead, please check the relevant man pages.


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