FW: [SlugLUG] I need some UCSC network-guru help

[Erich Blume]

Yikes, I intended this to be public, not direct to Ignacio. This is being
forwarded for completeness. (Is there an archive on the web page?)

Erich

------ Forwarded Message
From: Erich Blume <eblume at ucsc.edu>
Date: Mon, 01 May 2006 14:39:54 -0700
To: Ignacio Solis <isolis at igso.net>
Conversation: [SlugLUG] I need some UCSC network-guru help
Subject: Re: [SlugLUG] I need some UCSC network-guru help

Thanks, I'll give this a shot!



On 5/1/06 1:52 PM, "Ignacio Solis" <isolis at igso.net> wrote:

> Ok, so I skimmed over what you wrote so I don't really know all the details,
> but here are some suggestions:
> 
> Have somebody else log in for you and su to your account, using your password,
> which according to you works. Then do all changes from there.
> or
> SCP the files you need to change, most likely the login scripts. (I don't
> really know if your login gets that far, depends on wheter the shell you chose
> exists).

I should have thought of that. Thanks!

> 
> Also, for future reference. Be careful when you do that sort of thing,
> changing
> shells on a remote system you don't control. Always leave a few terminals open
> so you can _test_ things before loging out.
> 
> Having said that, why did /bin/bash not work?  I use zsh on all my systems and
> the first thing I did on the soe machines was to change to zsh as my shell, no
> problem (/bin/zsh).

A very good question. /bin/bash works just fine from the prompt, but
apparently it refuses to run in login mode. The script ypchsh (network
change shell) refused to accept /bin/bash as a valid shell. The shell that I
ended up selecting (via "which bash") prompted me with a '-' in front of the
normal "bash-3.00$" prompt, making it "-bash-3.00$". As far as I know, that
means the shell is specifically a login shell.

I never did understand what the difference between a login and interactive
shell were.

> 
> Another alternative is to use the same shell they give you, then write a
> little
> script that will change shells to the one you want. That way you won't have
> these problems and you can select the shell based on the system you log into,
> from, at, when, etc.

That's what I was using at first, and it worked fine, but I was tired of
having to type "exit" twice to logout. Since /bin/bash is an interactive
shell, typing "logout" just returns an error, along the lines of "this is
not a login shell".

> 
> Nacho

Erich

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