UUCPD(8)

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💖 UUCPD 💖

okay bestie, so this is the UUCPD(8) page from the Linux Administrator's Manual — it's giving "old school but still kinda iconic", and i'm gonna walk you through it fr fr 🦋

✨ NAME ✨

uucpd, in.uucpd — the lil helper that runs uucico for you from inetd 🎀

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

/usr/sbin/in.uucpd

that's it. one line. minimalism is the vibe 💅

🌈 DESCRIPTION 🌈

so like, uucpd is a program that gets run from inetd whenever inetd spots a connect on the uucp port — which is usually 540. 👑

it uses pam to authenticate users. no cap, that's the whole authentication pipeline.

and then — the part that's lowkey the plot twist — if access by pam would be granted, and the first six letters of the basename of the shell match the word uucico, then:

  1. an utmp and wtmp entry get written ✍️
  2. the user's shell is invoked 🐚

and the uucpd process just... stays there. chilling. waiting. it hangs around until uucico exits, and then it updates the utmp and wtmp files one more time. that's the whole arc. character development who 💖

✨ OPTIONS ✨

none. literally none. the options list is empty. it's giving "i have nothing to say and i'm saying it" 😭

🦋 NOTES 🦋

okay so there's some lore here, listen up 📢

Uucico also has the possibility to check for loginname/password itself directly, instead of needing a frontend uucpd. main character energy, honestly.

but — and this is the important part — that does not work if:

  • the system has shadow passwords 💀
  • or any other way of authentication which requires root privileges 😭

also, when it does that, no utmp/wtmp records are written. just so you know. no receipts.

🌟 and if you want to define UUCP accounts outside the password file (eg through /etc/uucp/passwd) you need to call uucico -l from /etc/inetd.conf instead of in.uucpd. write that down bestie, that's the move.

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Miquel van Smoorenburg (<miquels@cistron.nl>) — we stan a legend 🫶

🌟 SEE ALSO 🌟

and that's the page!! the Linux Administrator's Manual version, dated Apr 20, 1999 — yeah she's vintage, she's an elder, and she still ate 💅✨ bye bestie, go read uucico(8) next 🎀

📦 where this page comes from