> My research has not found how to accomodate either of these
> requests.  Can anyone help?

> (1) I've set inittab to login at level 5.  Everything is fine, but after
> a few minutes, the login times out and the monitors go blank.
> Hitting return brings them back. This is a fine feature but one that
> I am asked to disable.  We need the login screen to stay on.  I
> have already disabled the timeout on the monitor itself, so it 
> seems to be Linux..  I had high hopes for /usr/share/config.kdmrc
> but it seems I can only change the login prompt there for the
> graphical login, not the duration.

For the console mode (text-mode) login, you can disable the "screen saver" 
blanking by giving the following command in one of the startup scripts: 
"setterm -blank 0"

For a graphical mode (X window) login, you can disable the screen saver 
by giving the following command after X is running (xset is an X client 
and needs to connect to the X server, so watch your access controls): 
"xset s off"

I believe you can also give the "-v" command-line option to XFree86 to 
turn off the video blanking.  The program which started XFree86 (in your 
case, probably kdm or gdm or some other display manager) has a config 
file which contains the command-line it uses to start the X server.  You 
can usually find this in /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers .  Incidentally there is 
lots of other interesting stuff in the /etc/X11/xdm directory, including 
the Xsetup_0 script which sets the wallpaper, background color, etc. and 
other important scripts that are run by the display manager.

> (2)  How do I disable the password sanity checks in yppasswd?
> Someone wants to be able to allow any password the user wants
> to use.  No checks should be made for "too short" or "dictionary
> word" or whatever.  I know this is not a good idea, but that's not
> the question.  How do I make it work this way?

I don't know the answer to your specific question but I've sometimes 
found it necessary to edit the source and recompile the passwd utility to 
accomplish this; you may need to do the same for yppasswd.

My programming method consists mainly of commenting out stuff and then 
seeing if it still works (or else commenting out the stuff that doesn't 
work) so the above task is do-able for someone with very little 
programming experience, as long as you can follow the general idea of the 
code.

Good luck!

--
Jim Ockers (ockers@ockers.net)                     Ask me about Linux!
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/

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