What is this “notty” host?
In looking at the process listing on a linux server, an administrator may see a process listed as “sshd: root@notty”. An administrator, even a seasoned one, may immediately wonder “what is this ‘notty’ host?” and start down the path of trying to determine what host that is.
However, sit back and take a deep breath: “notty” means “NO TTY”. In other words, there is no TTY associated to the process, which means that the process was initiated remotely. In this case, a non-interactive process was initiated remotely over SSH.
1 Comments
Rich
Reminds me of the very green administrator who, basing his comment on the current username format of “first initial” + “last name”, asked “Who is Robert Oot?”
After the tears washed away from laughing so hard, we had to tell him “Not Robert Oot. Root.. as the in the administrator user ‘root’.”