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Date:      Sat, 31 Aug 2002 13:22:06 -0400
From:      John Stalker <stalker@Math.Princeton.EDU>
To:        ports@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   wdm in a networked environment considered harmful
Message-ID:  <200208311722.g7VHM6x06757@math.Princeton.EDU>

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Hi,
	wdm works fine on a single machine, but it has one great drawback
when managing a remote display.  If the user selects "Halt" or "Reboot"
it will halt or reboot the machine running wdm, not the machine running
the Xserver.  Worse yet, there doesn't seem to be any easy fix by
modifying wdm-config because the DisplayManager*wdmHalt and
DisplayManager*wdmReboot resources are commands which run in a
shell with the DISPLAY variable unset.  On my home LAN I fixed
this by hacking Greet.c and resource.c to call a shell script--or,
more generally, anything which can be execve'ed--with two arguments:
whether halt or reboot was selected and the display name.  I then
wrote a shell script to determine the hostname from the display
and halt or reboot, using ssh to run sudo halt or sudo reboot on
a special account on the X server.  This is probably not the most
elegant solution, but I am willing contribute the code if noone has
a better idea.  In any case the current default is quite counter-intuitive
for users, who normally expect the halt or reboot will halt or reboot
the computer sitting in front of them, and could be considered a security
hazard.
--
John Stalker
Department of Mathematics
Princeton University
(609)258-6469

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