sshd com­piled –with-osfsia evi­dently does not honor the “Per­mit­Root­Lo­gin no” con­fig­u­ra­tion directive.

Con­se­quently the retards from China who try to break into my-computer every cou­ple of days(*) wind up incre­ment­ing the failed login count for root. Because Tru64 UNIX is the most secure oper­at­ing sys­tem ever devised, and I have the para­noia con­trols turned all the way to 11, the abil­ity to log in as root is reg­u­larly revoked! It can only be restored from the text-only sys­tem console.

This is incred­i­bly frus­trat­ing, and I hon­estly can’t fig­ure out how to relax the policy.

Futher­more, because of a bizarre PAL­code bug on all Alphas­ta­tions, a key­board con­nected through a KVM switch will not allow you to type a ques­tion mark on the con­sole. Cur­rently this pre­vents me from log­ging in as root at all, so I had to drag out another key­board and plug it into the back of the damn machine. Of course my pass­word doesn’t always con­tain a ques­tion mark, so I never think of this bug until I’ve gone through about 50 failed con­sole logins.

(*) This is why I fil­ter out most of Asia by net­block. It’s fairly effec­tive at reduc­ing hack attempts.