[Simh] Releasing terspy.mar - vax/vms terminal spy program

[Stafford Winters]

I've never met Hunter, but I will say I've used MGLOGIN, replaced by 
HGLOGIN, and it has been very useful.  I've also used CONTRL, PEEK & 
SPY, and SUPERVISE.  All of these have worked without problems.

In the early 90's, I did try to use WATCH a few times, but it seems like 
it generally crashed the system, and not just when I tried to use it.

I appreciate Hunter's contributions to the VMS community.

On 3/25/2020 8:27 AM, Hunter Goatley wrote:
> On 3/25/2020 10:03 AM, Hittner, David T [US] (MS) wrote:
>>
>> For a while, there was a company selling a SPY utility for VMS, as 
>> well as freebie versions floating around. The commercial version 
>> allowed the watcher to enter data in the watched session by using a 
>> special command sequence to enable remote data entry. I don’t recall 
>> any of the freebie versions ever allowing data entry from the 
>> watcher, for fairly obvious security reasons.
>>
> Clyde Digital Systems had AUDIT and CONTRL that let you do that (AUDIT 
> logged, CONTRL let an admin watch and/or take over a terminal 
> session). Networking Dynamics had PEEK and SPY, which were competing 
> products.
>
> I should say "has." Networking Dynamics still sells PEEK & SPY, and 
> Raxco still sells AUDIT and CONTRL.
>
> I worked for Clyde Digital.
>
> There was a freeware program called WATCH. It did not allow for taking 
> over a session, just watching it. Or maybe it did allow it and was 
> just so buggy that you were advised not to.
>
> Then there was the Supervisor Series, sold by Precision Data Systems. 
> They were later acquired by Security Pacific Software Services. In 
> 1992, they released the Supervisor Series into the public domain. At 
> that point, I took it over, added features, fixed bugs, and maintained 
> it as the Supervisor Series freeware project.
>
> I maintained that for several years, but due to the litigious nature 
> of yet another company with competing products, I never ported the 
> Supervisor Series to Alpha (which means it was never ported to 
> Itanium, either).
>
> The Supervisor Series still runs on OpenVMS VAX V5.0 or later. You can 
> find it here:
>
> http://vms.process.com/scripts/fileserv/fileserv_search.exe?package=supervisor&description=&author=&system=Either&language=All&RD=&RM=&RY=
>
>
>> There was also another highly privileged program on the DECUS tapes, 
>> GLOGIN, which allowed a privileged user to login as another user, so 
>> that you could see what application behavior occurred within the 
>> context of a specific user. I found a weird bug in one of our 
>> application programs that only occurred when the username was 
>> _exactly_ 7 characters long using GLOGIN to login as the user who had 
>> reported the bug that we couldn’t duplicate ourselves. J
>>
> The original GLOGIN used the pseudo-terminal routines that used to 
> float around. When DEC added the supported PTD$ routines for pseudo 
> terminals, I wrote my own version of that called HGLOGIN. Here's part 
> of the readme:
>
>     HGLOGIN lets privileged users log in to a named account without
>     having to know the password for that account.  A process running
>     under the target username is created.  Its input and output are
>     read from a pseudo-terminal, which is controlled by HGLOGIN.
>
>     Unlike BECOME and SWAP, the process created by HGLOGIN is a full
>     process, with all the privileges, rights identifiers, quotas, DCL
>     symbols, logical names, etc., as well as anything else that is set
>     up in the target user's LOGIN.COM.
>
> BECOME and SWAP were two other kernel-mode programs that modified the 
> username and UIC of the running process to be some other user. They 
> were handy, but they had kernel-mode code and they didn't change 
> quotas, etc. HGLOGIN was also much safer to use, as it used a 
> documented interface provided by VMS.
>
> HGLOGIN is also available in my freeware archive. It runs on all 
> platforms, but requires whatever version of VMS introduced the PTD$ 
> routines.
>
> http://vms.process.com/scripts/fileserv/fileserv_search.exe?package=hglogin&description=&author=&system=Either&language=All&RD=&RM=&RY=
>
> If you're not familiar with my VMS freeware archive:
>
> http://www.process.com/resources/openvms/index.html
>
>
> -- 
> Hunter
> ------
> Hunter Goatley, Process Software,http://www.process.com/
> goathunter at goatley.com    http://hunter.goatley.com/
>
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