From: gpitcher@crash.cts.com (Glenn Pitcher)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386
Subject: Getty problem with Interactivee 3.0?
Keywords: getty init interactive
Date: 1 Sep 92 00:14:21 GMT

I just finished fighting my system for most of the day and it's working now,
but I sure would like to know what happened...

First off, here's our configuration...

Dell 433SE running Interactive SVR3.2
64MB memory
(3) 1.4GB drives (3.8BG formatted)
Exabyte 8200 8mm drive
Equinox Megaplex-96 board with 4 cluster multiplexors.

What seems to have happened is init wouldn't spawn *any* gettys.  Not even on
the console.  Everything else would work fine except for the gettys.
My printers even were printing jobs that were left over from the weekend due
to no paper and these are hooked to the same muxes as the terminals! 
I managed to get the system up into init 1 and checked everything.  I checked
/etc/inittab, I checked getty and init, I checked /etc/gettydefs and almost
everything else I can think of.  Everything checked out fine.

We did, as a last resort, check our EISA configuration.  The only problem we
found was that the 'fast video' setting was 'on' and not 'cached'.  I changed
it to 'cached', reset the system and behold! the system came up.  I went back
into the configuration and found out that I really hadn't changed this EISA
after all!   I did go ahead and make sure it was changed it but it made no
difference... the system still came up fine.

Here's a couple of interesting tidbits that may help...

1) Not only could I not get getty running on my dumb terminals hooked to the
   Equinox board, I couldn't get any running on my virtual terminals on the
   PC console (/dev/vt01 thru /dev/vt08)
2) When the system was coming up, I would receive normal output from jobs
   on /dev/console (/dev/console is the same as /dev/ttyaA on our system and
   is hooked up to the Equinox board).  Even when fsck would ask questions,
   I could respond.  Only when getty should have taken over would I have  
   problems.
3) Like I mentioned above, I had one printer still producing output even
   though I was connected to the Equinox board so I think I can pretty safely
   assume that this is not the problem.
4) Once I got the system into init 1, we messed around with the inittab file;
   trying to get one bank of terminals to come up in init 1, along with my
   virtual terminals.  After I did 'init q', nothing happened... but when I
   issued 'who -a', I found a bunch of dead LOGIN and getty processes for
   these terminals.  This output told me they all ended with SIGTERM and a 
   rc of 0.  Hmmm.
5) The system was fine when I was last on yesterday at 1400.   I recycle the
   system at 0145 and all the output was fine except for a couple items.  
   1) There was no login prompt after this init 6 so that means that this 
   problem happened sometime between 1400 on Sunday and 0145 on Monday.  
   2) The initdefault entry in the /etc/inittab file is set to 3 because I
   run a SLIP line locally.  Saturday morning when the system was recycled,
   I'm sure it came up fine but the console output from the last init 6 
   did not show the jobs which are run when it goes into init 3.  It only
   showed the output that would be produced with init 2.  And yes, I did make
   100% sure my inittab file was ok :-)

I don't know... The only time I've seen something like this was when I would
do something stupid like wipe out the inittab file but I know I didn't 
do anything this time!! Honest! :-)

Does anyone have any ideas?