Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

Setting Up Your System for Dialing In

If you want to set up your site for dialing in, you have to permit logins on your serial port and customize some system files to provide UUCP accounts, which we will cover in this section.

Providing UUCP Accounts

To begin with, you have to set up user accounts that let remote sites log into your system and establish a UUCP connection. Generally, you will provide a separate login name to each system that polls you. When setting up an account for system pablo, you might give it the username Upablo. There is no enforced policy on login names; they can be just about anything, but it will be convenient for you if the login name is easily related to the remote host name.

For systems that dial in through the serial port, you usually have to add these accounts to the system password file /etc/passwd. It is good practice to put all UUCP logins in a special group, such as uuguest. The account’s home directory should be set to the public spool directory /var/spool/uucppublic; its login shell must be uucico.

To serve UUCP systems that connect to your site over TCP, you have to set up inetd to handle incoming connections on the uucp port by adding the following line to /etc/inetd.conf:^[101]

uucp   stream  tcp   nowait  root  /usr/sbin/tcpd  /usr/lib/uucp/uucico -l

The -l option makes uucico perform its own login authorization. It prompts for a login name and a password just like the standard login program, but relies on its private password database instead ...