Network logins work a little differently than normal logins.
There is a separate physical serial line for each terminal via
which it is possible to log in. For each person logging in via
the network, there is a separate virtual network connection,
and there can be any number of these
. It is
therefore not possible to run a separate getty for each
possible virtual connection. There are also several different
ways to log in via a network, telnet and rlogin being
the major ones in TCP/IP networks.
Network logins have, instead of a herd of getty s, a single daemon per way of logging in (telnet and rlogin have separate daemons) that listens for all incoming login attempts. When it notices one, it starts a new instance of itself to handle that single attempt; the original instance continues to listen for other attempts. The new instance works similarly to getty .