Console screen

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xy16644

I have noticed that when I sit at the console of my server (which is very rare) I have noticed that there is plenty of output on the screen about people logging in remotely (via SSH) and a few other lines of info that appear.

Is it possible to turn ALL of this output off on the console so that when someone looks at the screen ALL they see is the login prompt?
 
jmccue said:
syslog.conf or
$ man syslog.conf
see /dev/console

John
Click to expand...

I think thats what I was looking for. I ended up commenting out:
Code: 
#*.err;kern.warning;auth.notice;mail.crit               /dev/console

in the /etc/syslog.conf and restarted the service:
Code: 
/etc/rc.d/syslogd restart

I'll monitor it to see if it does the trick! Thanks!
 
if you do that, you should also uncomment the line for /var/log/console.log, so you don't miss anything important.
 
phoenix said:
if you do that, you should also uncomment the line for /var/log/console.log, so you don't miss anything important.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that. I funny enough did uncomment it as follows:
Code: 
console.info                                    /var/log/console.log

But my /var/log/console.log is not showing any new entries even after I have logged on a few times since making this change. Is this due to me commenting out the console line?

I would like to log this activity but I don't want anything to appear on the console screen.
 
Did you restart syslog after editing the file?
# service syslog reload

(might be restart instead of reload)
 
xy16644 said:
But my /var/log/console.log is not showing any new entries even after I have logged on a few times since making this change.
Click to expand...

If the same message appears several times one after the other only then syslog(3) waits till the last event occurs, prints one message only and a line saying something similar to "the last message repeated x times".
If the login event was the only that should have been written to your log file then the same might happen to you.
Try playing with logger(1) to test syslog(3) settings. And always send a message different from the previous.
 
Thanks all!

What I ended up doing in/etc/syslog.conf was commenting out:
Code: 
#*.err;kern.warning;auth.notice;mail.crit               /dev/console

and the copying the above line to a new line and changing it to:
Code: 
*.err;kern.*;authpriv.none;mail.crit             /dev/console

I then added :
Code: 
auth.notice                                     /var/log/console.log

and made sure this was uncommented:
Code: 
console.info                                    /var/log/console.log

and restarted the service:
Code: 
/etc/rc.d/syslogd restart

Now when I am sitting at the console the *only* thing I can see on the screen (currently) is the login prompt and my server name. This is exactly what I wanted. Its clean and more secure as its not displaying who is logging on remotely and what their usernames are.

I am curious to know if you can remove the server s hostname from the login prompt? That would be very nice if that was possible! :e
 
Aaaah thanks for the link to that thread. I think if I remove "%h" from my /etc/gettytab file it will remove the hostname.

Once this change is made, is there a service that you need to restart for the change to take effect? Or is a reboot required?
 
xy16644 said:
Once this change is made, is there a service that you need to restart for the change to take effect? Or is a reboot required?
Click to expand...

My gess is that already running terminals will display according to the old configuration, so they need a restart. I think an escape to single user mode and come back to multiuser would be enough (this is faster than a reboot but take care: network connections are lost, users are thrown out):
# shutdown now
Hit enter when it asks for the shell path. Now you are in single user mode. Go back to multiuser.
# exit
 
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