TTY Autologin
By using agetty
How
Install agetty:
# apk add agetty
Edit /etc/inittab to use agetty
Example for the virtual terminal tty1:
tty1::respawn:/sbin/agetty --autologin root tty1 linux
Example inittab entry for a serial terminal on ttys01:
ttyS0::respawn:/sbin/agetty --autologin root ttyS0 vt100
By compiling your own autologin wrapper
How
- Writing a wrapper, called autologin, around /bin/login and moving it in /usr/sbin/
- Editing /etc/inittab specifying the use of /usr/sbin/autologin instead of /bin/login
Prerequisites
Example on how to assolve the prerequisites:
# apk add gcc musl-dev
Writing the autologin.c program
Create a file in this example called autologin.c
Contents of autologin.c
The program makes a system call to execute the login binary (part of busybox) which will be searched in $PATH.
As parameters are passed:
- -f flag which stands for "Do not authenticate (user already authenticated)"
- username in this example is root but if you created a new user, its username can be used instead.
Compiling the autologin.c program
If using gcc:
# gcc -o autologin autologin.c
Move the binary autologin to /usr/sbin
# mv autologin /usr/sbin/
Editing /etc/inittab
Open /etc/inittab
replace ":respawn:/sbin/getty" with ":respawn:/sbin/getty -n -l /usr/sbin/autologin" for each TTY you want to enable autologin.
- The getty's -n flag do not prompt the user for a login name
- The getty's -l flag invokes a custom login instead of /bin/login; in our case it is set to invoke /usr/sbin/autologin
Note
To perform such a replacement on all TTYs, the following command can be used:
# sed -i 's@:respawn:/sbin/getty@:respawn:/sbin/getty -n -l /usr/sbin/autologin@g' /etc/inittab
- "@" is used as a delimiter
- The -i flag edits the file in-place
Cleaning up
It is possible to remove the autologin.c file, the C compiler and the musl-dev package