Re: [PLUG] the most serious vuln (today)

[Fred Stluka <fred@bristle.com>]

On 4/11/18 11:25 AM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 11:03 AM, Fred Stluka <fred@bristle.com> wrote:
> > Interesting... I never knew there was an official beep command.
> > I wrote one myself 30 years ago.  It's a shell script that simply echoes
> > a Ctrl-G character.  I later added a feature to echo a text string as well
> > as beeping.
> I think the intent of the beep program (especially if installed suid)
> is for programs to be able to beep the speaker WITHOUT having write
> access to the system console or audio devices (such as for a daemon).
>
> Echoing Ctrl-G is a superior solution for console-oriented software,
> because for remote connections it will beep the user's terminal, and
> not the system console (which could be on the other side of the planet
> in a datacenter).
>
> I believe the intent of the beep command is to only beep the system
> speaker itself.  Perhaps it might be used by some kind of daemon to
> get an operator's attention/etc.  Really though I don't see the point
> as it tends to conflate the more desktop-oriented experience (where
> the user should have write access to console/audio/etc) and the more
> server-oriented experience (where there are certainly better ways to
> do monitoring, especially since that little PC speaker doesn't scale
> well when you have racks of servers in a noisy room, possibly remotely
> administered).
Ah...  Makes sense.  Thanks for the explanation!

--Fred
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Fred Stluka -- Bristle Software, Inc. -- http://bristle.com
#DontBeATrump -- Make America Honorable Again!
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