Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 49610
login banners
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:00 EDT
Description of Problem: Current "Fairfax" provides in /etc/issue and /etc/issue.net "fixed" login banners with a string 'Kernel \r on an \m'. What, on earth, give you an idea that a tty supplying program will be able to interpret these escapes? If for a "regular" console there is a fair chance that this will be mingetty, although this is far from given, it is quite unlikely that whatever used on serial lines or network connections will have this ability. In particular if you will telnet to a machine running Fairfax to itself you will be greeted by the following: Escape character is '^]'. Red Hat Linux release 7.1.92 (Fairfax) Kernel \r on an \m login: "Old hands" will shrug and replace; often they run custom banners anyway. Newbies will be terminally baffled. Note that "fixing" /etc/issue.net still does nothing for serial connections or alternate getty programs.
That was a telnet-server bug, which has since been fixed. FWIW, everything in the distro (telnet-server, mingetty, mgetty, agetty) all support the same sequences.
Upgrading from 7.0 to fairfax beta2 causes /etc/issue not to be updated, thus resulting in the login banner to display kernel version 2.2.16-22, /proc/version showing 2.4.6-2.