RDP sessions opened with xrdp are not listed in system tools like who

[pktiuk]

I would like to have universal way of checking list of active sessions on my machine and I use universal linux tools to track it.
I use cockpit and who commandline utility. None of these lists sessions opened via xrdp.

I guess something is wrong with initializing sessions.

I opened similar issue in cockpit repository: cockpit-project/cockpit#18810

[matt335672]

Can you tell us what your OS is?

I'm pretty sure this is a duplicate of #1302

[pktiuk]

Ubuntu 22.04

[pktiuk]

@matt335672
so, it this issue a duplicate or not?
Could I help you with solving this issue in any way? (I can provide additional logs and test it also on Ubuntu 20.04)

[matt335672]

Yes it is.

For who to work, you need the something to update /var/run/utmp. This functionality doesn't seem to be available via a Linux PAM module at present. There's an interesting comment in the Wikipedia entry for utmp:-

These files are not set by any given PAM module (such as pam_unix.so or pam_sss.so) but are set by the application performing the operation (e.g. mingetty, /bin/login, or sshd). As such it is the obligation of the program itself to record the utmp information.

I'm not sure how true this is in general - on FreeBSD I think PAM does do this.

The good news is that now we've re-architected sesman in devel, adding support for these should be quite easy. This isn't going to be back-ported to v0.9.x however.

[pktiuk]

The good news is that now we've re-architected sesman in devel, adding support for these should be quite easy. This isn't going to be back-ported to v0.9.x however

I'm fine with that. I just hope it fixed version will be available in Ubuntu 24.04 :)

[akarl10]

@pktiuk if all you want to know is who is logged in (and not really more) maybe loginctl list-sessions is a who alternative for you.

Of course this will not solve the issue that cockpit does not show the last login

[matt335672]

Closing as a duplicate of #1302