On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 10:20:16AM +1100, matthew green wrote:
   
   > are you saying that if you wait for the password: prompt and type
   > fast you get those characters echoed?  (it more sounds like you're
   > typing the username/password together as fast as possible, and not
   > waiting for getty/login to prompt you.)
   
   :) that's almost it, getty waits and already prompted for the username,
   but then I don't wait for the password prompt (which is assumed to be ready
   already after the username was entered, it is usually the case, except
   under some circumstances where some delay occurs before the second prompt
   appears)... When this happens (usually after first bootup, or when the system
   has been idle for a while), the password string is obviously output to
   the console.
   
   This also happens to various other users here (we almost only use NetBSD in
   the tech room)... The only inconvenience was that at times someone else was
   besides watching and passwords had to be changed at occasions.


if you're not waiting for the Password: prompt before typing your
password, then you should start waiting!  there's really nothing
else you can do.

i imagine the reason that it happens at system boot and after idle
is that what happens is:  getty prints "login:" and reads your
username, and then exec /usr/bin/login with that name, and it is
login that prints "Password:".  thus, the first time that getty
exec's login, it's probably never run login before so has to page
in parts of it, etc., and also after idle time login's pages have
almost certainly been flushed from core memory, thus need to be
paged in again.



.mrg.