I have a Redhat LINUX 9 partition on a WINDOWS machine, that I boot up
weekly or maybe daily to copy (clone) two disk drives to two similar
drives. It automatically reboots WINDOWS when done. I'd like to be able
to initiate the process and walk away, rather than having to login each
time it boots. Security is not an issue.

1) Is there any known way of doing this?

2) Where is the login source code located? I've searched all through
kernel and  coreutils sources for getlogin but can't find it. (I see
references to it, but not the code itself.)

Thanks for any hints or outright solutions.

John V. Kjellman
Henniker, NH

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On Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:22:31 -0400, "John V. Kjellman"
<johnk@victorex.com> wrote:

>I have a Redhat LINUX 9 partition on a WINDOWS machine, that I boot up
>weekly or maybe daily to copy (clone) two disk drives to two similar
>drives. It automatically reboots WINDOWS when done. I'd like to be able
>to initiate the process and walk away, rather than having to login each
>time it boots. Security is not an issue.
>
>1) Is there any known way of doing this?

It sounds like your knowledge is in some ways more sophisticated than
mine, and I hope you'll excuse my response if it's off base, but your
question puzzles me:  Of course there is a way.  There are many ways.
For instance, you could put shell commands to run the cloning job in
something like /etc/rc.d/rc.local, or another startup script that you
had configured to run in the boot sequence for the runlevel you were
using, and you wouldn't even have to log in.  If you wanted a text
mode prompt enabled so you could interact with the system, you could
use runlevel 1 or 2, and, again, no actual login would be needed.  The
"su" command could be used from one of those runlevels to acquire the
identity and privileges of a particular user if desired.  If you
wanted the equivalent of the result of a graphical login, you could
configure a display manager (e.g. kdm or gdm) to log in a default
user.  Cron can be configured to run a particular job as a particular
user in the background at a specified time.  There might be a better
or optimal way in some sense or other, but in and of itself this
shouldn't be a very elusive goal.

>2) Where is the login source code located? I've searched all through
>kernel and  coreutils sources for getlogin but can't find it. (I see
>references to it, but not the code itself.)

That I don't know, but it shouldn't be necessary to hack the kernel
just to get a job to run non-interactively.

>Thanks for any hints or outright solutions.
>
>John V. Kjellman
>Henniker, NH

Hope this is at least useful as a start; maybe I misunderstood, but it
seems like what you want to do would be a lot easier than you imply.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Dear Some Other Somebody,

You're right, upon reading your post it's obvious I wasn't thinking
very creatively. putting something in rc.local is probably my best
solution, and far, far easier than digging into source code that I'm not
familiar with. That's the beauty of LINUX, many ways to skin the cat.
Thanks for setting me straight.

Regards,
John V. Kjellman

Some Other Somebody Else wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:22:31 -0400, "John V. Kjellman"
> <johnk@victorex.com> wrote:
>
> 
>
>
> It sounds like your knowledge is in some ways more sophisticated than
> mine, and I hope you'll excuse my response if it's off base, but your
> question puzzles me:  Of course there is a way.  There are many ways.
> For instance, you could put shell commands to run the cloning job in
> something like /etc/rc.d/rc.local, or another startup script that you
> had configured to run in the boot sequence for the runlevel you were
> using, and you wouldn't even have to log in.  If you wanted a text
> mode prompt enabled so you could interact with the system, you could
> use runlevel 1 or 2, and, again, no actual login would be needed.  The
> "su" command could be used from one of those runlevels to acquire the
> identity and privileges of a particular user if desired.  If you
> wanted the equivalent of the result of a graphical login, you could
> configure a display manager (e.g. kdm or gdm) to log in a default
> user.  Cron can be configured to run a particular job as a particular
> user in the background at a specified time.  There might be a better
> or optimal way in some sense or other, but in and of itself this
> shouldn't be a very elusive goal.
>
> 
>
>
> That I don't know, but it shouldn't be necessary to hack the kernel
> just to get a job to run non-interactively.
>
> 
>
>
> Hope this is at least useful as a start; maybe I misunderstood, but it
> seems like what you want to do would be a lot easier than you imply.

--
John V. Kjellman (johnk@victorex.com)
Victorex, Inc.
P.O. Box 730
Henniker, New Hampshire 03242-0730
(603) 428-8200

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

John V. Kjellman wrote:
>    You're right, upon reading your post it's obvious I wasn't thinking
> very creatively. putting something in rc.local is probably my best
> solution, and far, far easier than digging into source code that I'm not
> familiar with. That's the beauty of LINUX, many ways to skin the cat.
> Thanks for setting me straight.

I am bothering to argue with about the benefit of using
/etc/rc.d/rc.local to achieve your goal. But just remind you that with
gdm or kdm display manager you can easily setup automatic login, no need
to dig into any source code. Better yet, you can just use some shell
script as your initialization script and in this script you get you r
disk-copying and rebooting done. It is similir to the rc.local approach.

Cheers,

--
NT stands for New Technology. Windowds NT(NT4.x)/2K(NT5.0)/XP(NT5.1)
was built on NT Technology. Anyone understands what "new" means, so
everyone knows M$ Windows NT/2K/XP/Whatever is a *real* innovation.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

John V. Kjellman wrote:
>    You're right, upon reading your post it's obvious I wasn't thinking
> very creatively. putting something in rc.local is probably my best
> solution, and far, far easier than digging into source code that I'm not
> familiar with. That's the beauty of LINUX, many ways to skin the cat.
> Thanks for setting me straight.

I won't bother to argue about the benefit of using
/etc/rc.d/rc.local to achieve your goal. But just remind you that with
gdm or kdm display manager you can easily setup automatic login, no need
to dig into any source code. Or, you can just use some shell
script as your initialization script and in this script you get you r
disk-copying and rebooting done. It is similir to the rc.local approach
but again, no need to touch any source code.

Cheers,

KB

--
NT stands for New Technology. Windowds NT(NT4.x)/2K(NT5.0)/XP(NT5.1)
was built on NT Technology. Anyone understands what "new" means, so
everyone knows M$ Windows NT/2K/XP/Whatever is a *real* innovation.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Thanks for the ideas, but I don't use gdm or kdm - strictly command-line
stuff, and not much of that on this particular system.

Regards,
John K.

Kill Bill wrote:
> John V. Kjellman wrote: 
>
> I won't bother to argue about the benefit of using
> /etc/rc.d/rc.local to achieve your goal. But just remind you that with
> gdm or kdm display manager you can easily setup automatic login, no need
> to dig into any source code. Or, you can just use some shell
> script as your initialization script and in this script you get you r
> disk-copying and rebooting done. It is similir to the rc.local approach
> but again, no need to touch any source code.
>
> Cheers,
>
> KB
>

--
John V. Kjellman (johnk@victorex.com)
Victorex, Inc.
P.O. Box 730
Henniker, New Hampshire 03242-0730
(603) 428-8200

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

On Wed, 02 Nov 2005 16:55:39 -0500, John V. Kjellman wrote:

> Thanks for the ideas, but I don't use gdm or kdm - strictly command-line
> stuff, and not much of that on this particular system.

Then what's the point of logging in at all?

--
The U.S. Government today announced that it is changing its emblem from an
Eagle to a CONDOM because it more accurately reflects the government's
political stance... A condom allows for inflation, halts production, destroy
s
the next generation, protects a bunch of pricks, and gives you a sense of
security while you're being screwed.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Um, what are you guys talking about?  You don't have to either log in
or edit source code to run a job from rc.local.  This seems like much
ado about nothing.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Some Other Somebody Else wrote:
> Um, what are you guys talking about?  You don't have to either log in
> or edit source code to run a job from rc.local.  This seems like much
> ado about nothing.

Well, it does seem to have evolved into that.

I completely agreed after "some other person's" first post to my query,
that delving into source code to accomplish what I needed to accomplish
was not the way to go. Using rc.local seems to me to be an eminently
good idea. I've used rc.local for many other applications, it just
didn't click with me when I first thought about the problem at hand.
Thus the benefit of this forum where some quickly see the obvious that
others have missed.

And in regards to Ivan Marsh's comment, I again agree, I can do what I
want without logging-in.

Regards,
John K

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

On Thu, 03 Nov 2005 11:48:22 +0000, Some Other Somebody Else wrote:

> Um, what are you guys talking about?  You don't have to either log in or
> edit source code to run a job from rc.local.  This seems like much ado
> about nothing.

Indeed. If you don't use a GUI and you don't use the command line there
isn't much reason to login at all, automated or not.

--
The U.S. Government today announced that it is changing its emblem from an
Eagle to a CONDOM because it more accurately reflects the government's
political stance... A condom allows for inflation, halts production, destroy
s
the next generation, protects a bunch of pricks, and gives you a sense of
security while you're being screwed.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]