Is it possible to get a login prompt on a remote server, directly after boot?

Question

The usual workflow to connect to a remote machine is as follows:

1. Log into local machine
2. Fire up a terminal window
3. Type "ssh [email protected]"
4. Log into remote machine

I want to get rid of the local Log-in, and compress this into a single step. Like a VT220 terminal would do. Intended workflow:

1. Boot the terminal machine (text mode)
2. The user presented with a tty with login prompt on
3. User types in it's credentials
4. The credentials are verified on a remote machine (r.lan)
5. The user drops into a shell the remote machine (r.lan)

Context: I am designing a simple terminal application, that I want some customers to use. The application should be run from dedicated terminals with minimal hardware. If I run the application locally, I can just change the login shell to point to the application and get the desired workflow (user-auth then directly drop into the app). However, I want this application to reside on a server, and not have the user explicitly interact with the local machine and ssh.

Answer 1

Back when I was studying in an University of Technology (in 1997 or so), the local student guild received some old VT220 terminals and low-spec PCs (think Intel 20 MHz 386 CPUs) as a donation (from the uni's computing centre, I think). The guildroom already had a PC or two that could run a web browser, but the most needed service among the students was just a SSH connection that could be used to read email and use the (text-based) course enrollment system.

I wired up the terminals to the PCs, configured the getty processes to show a hostname: prompt instead of the usual login:. Then I took the source code of /bin/login and made a modified version of it.

That program would accept the hostname entered for getty as a command line parameter (just like username would normally be), then prompt for an actual username, and then exec() a SSH command for the desired remote host. When the SSH command exited, the entire "login session" would die and the process would automatically start over as init would re-start getty.

The same configuration could be used both on a local console and on a serial terminal connection. Now each of those old PCs could be made to serve as a multi-seat SSH kiosk!

You could do something similar, but even simpler as you would not need the hostname prompting step. Your modified /bin/login would just need to accept the already-typed username and launch a SSH connction to a specific remote machine. The SSH client would then show a password prompt.