This is actually a mingetty without the printfs.
Why?  Because then you can link it against dietlibc
(http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/).

Actually, diet libc now supports printf, but not using it makes binaries
smaller nonetheless.

The difference is remarkable:

USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root      5487  0.0  0.1  1180  444 tty5     S    00:40   0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty5
root      6035  0.0  0.0    16   16 tty5     S    00:45   0:00 /sbin/fgetty tty5



I saw that on some really absurdly broken crap Linux distributions
(apparently the ones using PAM ;-}), login stay in memory as long as a
user is logged in, wasting precious memory.  So I decided to write a
replacement login as well.

My login uses the checkpassword (see http://cr.yp.to/checkpwd.html)
password checking interface.  For the casual end-user, this means that
you will need to get and install checkpassword.  For others, this means
unprecedented flexibility for the system administrator, because the
authentication for login can be done separately from login, and without
sacrificing system resources.

The default checkpassword program from http://cr.yp.to/checkpwd.html)
checks against /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow, but the interface is general
enough to make it possible to plug in different authentication, even
RADIUS or LDAP or whatever you had in mind.  You just have to write the
trivial checkpassword utility for your authentication method.  I plan to
write a few small checkpassword variants to allow for shadowed MD5
passwords from a CBD database, for example.

This design has the following drawbacks:

  1. since checkpassword exits on error, there is no "bad
     username/password pair" error message.
  2. For the same reason, there is no 1 second delay on bad passwords.

We can't wrap checkpassword, because once the wrapper exits, init
respawns fgetty.  The only good solution would be to make a
checkpassword that prints the error message and exits only after a one
second delay.


login and login2 do _not_ mess with the tty or apply /etc/environment.
These are prime cases of unnecessary features in my eyes.  Do that in
your shell startup files or whatever.