Running top on system console without being logged on

[Colin J. Raven]

On Jan 6 at 21:04, Anthony Atkielski launched this into the bitstream:

> Reko Turja writes:
>
> RT> Actually not command line options as such, but you can make a login
> RT> class for the top user in /etc/login.conf and feed the options via TOP
> RT> environment variable from there.
> RT>
> RT> You cant shell out from top and renicing from non root account is
> RT> impossible (except dropping the niceness of your own process). I think
> RT> the approach is secure enough and if you give "topper" good enough
> RT> password or deny logon from anywhere except from console, everything
> RT> should be ok. Of course if the terminal is accessible to others than
> RT> administrative staff, giving out the usernames can be a risk, but you
> RT> can use the usernumbers option to avoid giving out the usernames.
> RT>
> RT> Did myself something very similar with a IPless firewall between a while
> RT> back but I ran vmstat in the console instead. Good one glance monitoring
> RT> without the need of logging on the machine itself.
>
> I created a special user that logs directly into top.  I don't run
> telnet or anything so login isn't possible from anywhere else, and it's
> a plain user account with a good password.  It seems to work pretty
> well.
>
While masking the machine/LAN/location specific info, could you please 
post how you did this? What shell etc etc. I (for one) would be *most* 
grateful for this since (like many apparently) I'd like to do this too. 
Not mission critical in my case, but wildly cool if it could be done 
securely.

Regards & TIA,
-Colin