As far as I can see libutempter as shipped in SL5 (and TUV and FC6 etc), 
is only usable by either root or things which are in the utempter group
(the permissions on the directory /usr/libexec/utempter/ are 710).

Nothing in my install is setgid utempter and I'm not sure what apart from 
xterm uses it (xterm has libutempter as a dependency).  Anyway xterm ends
up not putting in any utmp records (oops) gnome-terminal does but it uses 
gnome-pty-helper to do the utmp updating (why can't we have one mechanism 
used by everything?)

Now I was about to query TUV about this when I noticed that there is 
already a newer xterm package in 5x/SRPMS/vendor/xterm-215-5.el5.src.rpm 
though nothing appears in the list of bugfixes/errata/enhancements that I 
can see from TUV (maybe somewhere I can't see).

The changelog for this contains:

   * Wed May 16 2007 Miroslav Lichvar <[log in to unmask]> 215-5.el5
   - make xterm binary sgid utempter (#222847)

Is there any reason why I shouldn't build/test the xterm-215-5.el5 
package?  Does anyone know if this is likely to be in SL-5.1?

Note that in SL3 anyone/anything could call utempter.  I didn't check 
SL4...

BTW how long does it normally take for TUB to put up srpms into their ftp 
tree?  I can't see anything obvious for the recent (cups, poppler, xpdf,
kdegraphics) errata but I don't know if one normally expects to have to 
wait a day or two for them to appear...

-- 
Jon Peatfield,  Computer Officer,  DAMTP,  University of Cambridge
Mail:  [log in to unmask]     Web:  http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/