Mingetty not running - no virtual terminals

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1

Hi, running openSUSE 11.1 on a Dell Optiplex 755.

I have a problem where mingetty is not running, and therefore I have not virtual terminals (text mode consoles). ps shows the following:

#ps -a|grep tty
2633 tty7     00:00:00 X

Contents of /etc/inittab include the correct commands:

#grep mingetty /etc/inittab
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6

The logs don’t seem much help:

#grep mingetty /var/log/*

Returns nothing :frowning:

#dmesg|grep tty
console [tty0] enabled
serial8250: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
00:07: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
0000:00:03.3: ttyS4 at I/O 0xec98 (irq = 17) is a 16550A

Any ideas are welcome!

2

What happens if you try running mingetty manually, just to check?

/sbin/mingetty tty2

Any errors? Did a login show up on VT2?

3

Thanks for such a quick response!

The only option I have is to run it from a kterm:

#mingetty tty2
Warning: Program '/bin/bash' crashed.

And the following in /var/log/warn:

Jan 24 11:15:14 CC014 mingetty[6364]: mingetty: /dev/tty2: cannot get controlling tty: Operation not permitted

Which I think is more to do with the fact that Bash crashed rather than mingetty?

Similar results with tty1, 3, 4 etc.

4

What are the owner and group of the /dev/tty[1-6] devices?

Mine are root,tty for reference.

5

Yep, mine are also root:tty (except tty7 which is owned by my user login).

Permissions are 660 for interest

6

Sorry, I don’t see anything obviously wrong. Maybe the next step is to strace mingetty.

strace /sbin/mingetty /dev/tty2

7

wow - I have not used strace before, give a lot of info. Should I post the whole output here?

The last few lines before the crash are:

chown("/dev/tty2", 0, 5)                = 0
chmod("/dev/tty2", 0660)                = 0
rt_sigaction(SIGHUP, {0x1, ], SA_RESTORER, 0x7f4805e5d6e0}, {SIG_DFL, ], 0}, 8) = 0
rt_sigaction(SIGQUIT, {0x402020, ], SA_RESTORER, 0x7f4805e5d6e0}, NULL, 8) = 0
open("/dev/tty2", O_RDWR)               = 3
ioctl(3, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, {B38400 opost isig icanon echo ...}) = 0
vhangup(

Warning: Program '/bin/bash' crashed.

Will try to reboot into safe mode and see if there are differences.

8

The thing is, it shouldn’t even be calling /bin/bash at that stage. It first has to call /bin/login to get the user name and password before creating a shell for the user.

9

Sorry, that message is not part of the strace output, its generated by konsole.

Failsafe mode didn’t help, but if I type:

#init 3

in a konsole window then X and kdm are killed (obviously) but the tty’s start up!
Returning to init 5 restarts kdm and the tty’s still run.

I have checked /etc/inittab (see first post) and both runlevels 3 and 5 are configured.

There is nothing obvious in the runlevel editor or /etc/sysconfig editor - but I wonder is this a security feature? i.e. no text logins in graphic mode by default?

Odd eh?

10

No, according to inittab the vttys are active in both levels 3 and 5. Does this reliably happen at boot or was it just that time it went wrong? If you cannot repeat the problem then just write it off as one of those things.

11

Unfortunately its the same every single boot.

I don’t recall whether it was like this when I first installed. The only thing I can think of that I have done to affect it is to configure the Xen kernel and then remove it. Otherwise nothing else has really touched the runlevels.

Its not the end of the world, I can use konsole and now I have a workaround with init 3, but it would be good to get to the bottom of :\

12

Hi
I wonder if one of the services has been changed somehow? Can you check
to see whats running at what run level. Boot so it’s not working, then
check services (service -s) then drop to runlevel 3 and see again. The
other thought is running the command SuSEconfig.

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 11.1 x86 Kernel 2.6.27.7-9-default
up 2:15, 2 users, load average: 0.10, 0.09, 0.09
GPU GeForce 6600 TE/6200 TE - Driver Version: 180.22

13

Thanks, gave service -s a try but nothing really to report.
In konsole:

#service -s > service.rl5
#init 3

Now in a running tty

#service -s > service.rl3
# diff service.rl3 service.rl5
32,33c32,33
<    /sbin/syslog-ng (1926)
<    /sbin/klogd (1929)
---
>    /sbin/klogd (1984)
>    /sbin/syslog-ng (1989)
66c66
< Checking for service kdm: ..unused
---
> Checking for service kdm: ..running
126c126
< Checking for service kdm: ..unused
---
> Checking for service kdm: ..running

Ran SuSEconfig but unfortunately no difference. Thanks for the suggestions - anything else is welcome this one has me stumped!

14

There is a bug https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=447289 about a broken mingetty. It seems to have to do with recent kernels (as of opensuse 11.0 or 11.1).