Re: TIOCCONS security revisited

[Jan Engelhardt]

>
>He justified this by claiming that normal users don't need to grab the
>console output.
>
>I disagree. Normal users log into the desktop of their machine, and
>should expect to be able to see the console output just as much as if
>they logged into "the console" and worked without graphics.
>For example, I want to know when the machine I'm working on has
>problems, when somebody is probing sshd, and simply when one of my
>batch jobs wants to tell me something.
>

By console I suppose you mean "printk output", because that's the only 
thing I can decipher from the 'redirecting stuff' in the TIOCCONS function. 
(Reminds me of klogconsole which is some sort of redirector.)

There is one slight problem with tioccons: if kernel output was redirected 
to, say, /dev/pts/1 (some graphical app) and then /dev/pts/1 disappears, 
who is going to set the tioccons back? And to what value?

That's why there is "xconsole", which does read the entire syslog and not 
just console/printk messages.



Jan Engelhardt
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