What are these system logins from who command?
 

I've been using Linux for a a few years, but I'm still a little green around the edges. I recently noticed the following in my lab hosts at school, and I am trying to figure out what the system logins mean. The man page gives no info about the Comment section. The man page implies these are incoming or local logins. The hosts are all running Slackware 14.1.

Are these incoming login connections, outgoing connections, or something else? I do not expect to see these login sessions on my lab machines, and every machine I have looked at has them (always a subset of c1-c6), so I am mildly concerned. We have some cisco routers that are named c1 through c5, but there is no c6 router.

Looking at the processes, I see the following:
So, root is spawning ttys for these logins. But, what are they? Where can I determine why these are created, and for what purpose? Where does the id value come from? Are these possibly related to the routers, or is this some internal service login, and how would I verify that?

I can't find anything in the messages, system, or secure logs about these logins. They appear to be created about two minutes after reboot. I just rebooted and ssh'd back into this machine, and here they are again, with new times, and one new one:


I don't have /etc/anacrontab or /etc/crontab. Root's crontab doesn't have any jobs that run at reboot.
I recursively grep'd for c1 through c6 and agetty in my /etc/rc.d directory (which is the init directory on Slackware), and found only random other stuff like modules and keys that had the strings c1-c6 in them.

If you can point me toward identifying these, I'll owe you a drink.

-Joanna-

ttyx are virtual consoles. agetty is the program running as root to wait for someone to login on each of those consoles. It sets the username shown by who to LOGIN.

The term tty (teletypewriter) dates back to the beginning of multiuser computers. They connected to the mainframe using RS-232 (serial). Teletypewriters were mechanical devices which lead to the development of electronic terminals. The DEC VT100 was a popular model.

Most distributions create 6 virtual terminals tty1-tty6. You can switch between them by pressing the keys alt-f1 thru alt-f6 and you should see a login in prompt for each. These are local login processes. tty1 is the default and this is what you would see when linux boots without a GUI.

pts is a pseudo terminal and is created when you log in via ssh.

Thanks smallpond and michaelk! Those were my virtual terminals, which I proved by logging in on tty3 and running the who command, where the tty held by id=c3 was replaced by my login.

Thanks!