Why no more ptys on a Woody System?
The system was working fine until I fixed it.
Now, it works except for when one needs to run the screen
utility or anything else that spawns a shell including remote ssh
logins. those logins almost succeed until the shell spawns at which
point the session hangs indefinitely and you can't get out of it
except to open another window on the remote system and kill the
session that way.
On friday, I created this problem when I cleaned up .bashrc
and .bash_profile or at least it appears that I damaged the
environment.
If one looks in /dev/pts, there are no pseudo ttys and the
condition exists immediately upon reboot so nothing is seizing the
ptys. If you run expect, the sequence is:
spawn /bin/bash
The system has no more ptys. Ask your system administrator to create more.
while executing
"spawn $env(SHELL)"
I have compared the output of the env command with that on a
system I haven't managed to trash yet and it appears right. Here is
that output:
PWD=/home/martin
HZ=100
HISTFILE=
PS1=\a\!\h \W $
USER=martin
LS_COLORS= long list removed
MAIL=/var/mail/martin
EDITOR=/bin/vi
LANG=C
LOGNAME=martin
SHLVL=1
HUSHLOGIN=TRUE
PGPPATH= deleted
SHELL=/bin/bash
LYNX_CFG=/home/martin/lynx.cfg
TERM=vt100
HOME=/home/martin
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/etc:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/mh:
/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games:/home/martin/etc:/home/martin/bin
EXINIT=set wrapmargin=10
_=/usr/bin/env
OLDPWD= where I was last
I have looked in google and found discussion of a similar
issue with new installs of gnopernicus and lfs, but this installation
has never had any such problem until now. I can't tell exactly when I
caused it because everything else works including alsa audio and the
ability to use /dev/ttyS0. I didn't know anything was wrong until I
got home from work and tried to log in remotely from home. The
.bash_profile at the time, had a date command in it as one of the last
things to happen before the shell prompt appears and the valid date
would display. After that, nothing. Also remote ssh commands still
work perfectly. I just can't spawn anything that uses /dev/pts which,
BTW, has normal-looking permission flags. The only thing I notice on
working systems is that the /dev/pts directory shows a size of 0 bytes
and on this broken system, the size is 4096 which is what you get if
you mkdir /dev/pts. I have run out of stuff to look at so I need some
fresh ideas. cd /dev ./MAKEDEV generic doesn't do any more harm, but
it doesn't do any good either. Thanks for any constructive
suggestions.
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 24576 Jul 25 15:31 dev
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 13 2001 pts
Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group
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