Subject: Setting and using a password in W98
From: "fergus at bonhard dot uklinux dot net" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 14:57:02 -0000

All this is in W98:

I pasted the output from crypt {mypassword}into the appropriate place in
/etc/passwd as shown

    {myusername}:{output}:500:544::/home/{myusername}:/bin/bash

and now I get prompted for a password when starting Cygwin. Nice.

(This is when starting Cygwin with "c:\Cygwin\bin\rxvt -e /bin/login" but I
know there are lots of variations in how Cygwin may be started. Most of them
are successfully tripped up by this new setting.)

It's not really very secure, of course: anybody who knew even a bit about
things could hack /etc/passwd from Windows and climb in that way. But it
serves a small purpose. However: I hadn't expected that two of the simpler
startup modes

    c:\Cygwin\bin\bash --login
and
    c:\Cygwin\bin\bash --login -i

(the latter being exactly what's in c:\Cygwin\cygwin.bat) would both let me
straight in, by-passing the password protection.

Q1. Is there some way, in W98, that I can protect myself further?

By the way, other startup modes I have tried include

    1. c:\Cygwin\bin\bash followed by ./login at the bash-2.05a$ prompt
    2. c:\Cygwin\bin\rxvt followed by ./login at the $ prompt
    3. c:\Cygwin\bin\login
    4. c:\Cygwin\bin\rxvt -e /bin/login
    5. c:\Cygwin\bin\rxvt -e /bin/bash --login

It is not easy to distinguish quite what's optimal/ redundant/ inefficient
here. I use (4) and have seen (5) recommended. (3) is beautifully sparse.
Several other possibilities, not all that different from these, are clearly
"wrong" in that they cause what looks like a working terminal window  to be
flashed briefly to the screen before instantly disappearing. I'm sure there
are many other alternatives that work.

Summarising: I had been going to ask

Q2. what the "approved" startup sequence would be for somebody requiring
password protection and wanting also to start in a rxvt terminal. Is it (4)?

Q3. Could the contents of c:\Cygwin\cygwin.bat be "officially" tweaked to
c:\Cygwin\bin\login in order to gain the password-protection that is not
conferred by the current contents of c:\Cygwin\cygwin.bat, or would this
change simply induce other, different, equally bad consequences?!

Fergus

Fergus

Fergus

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