"Respawning too fast" errors after updates

[bill at horne.net (Bill Horne)]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Derek Martin" <blu at sophic.org>


> At some point hitherto, Bill Horne hath spake thusly:
> > # Run gettys in standard runlevels
> > 1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
> > 2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
> > 3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
> > # 2002-11-08 Removed tty4, tty5, es tty6 to stop respawning errors (ewh)
> > #4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
> > #5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
> > #6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6
>
> These look fine, i.e. there's essentially no difference between the
> ones that work and the ones that don't, other than the tty they run
> on.  Have you checked your logs?  Generally, mingetty will log an
> entry to syslog whenever something notable happens.

There are numerous entries in the "messages" file, like this one:

messages.1:Nov  8 07:57:12 billhorne /sbin/mingetty[904]:
/dev/tty4: cannot open tty: No such device

> Was mingetty itself upgraded?  Have you tried a different getty
> (getty, agetty, etc.)?

I don't think mingetty was upgraded; there's nothing in the up2date log
about it, and I didn't do anything manually.

> Did you ls -l /dev/tty[0-9] to make sure they're all there, and have
> reasonable permissions?

Herewith:

crw--w----    1 root     tty        4,   0 Apr 11  2002 /dev/tty0
crw--w----    1 root     tty        4,   1 Nov 11 22:11 /dev/tty1
crw-------    1 root     root       4,   2 Nov 11 18:10 /dev/tty2
crw-------    1 root     root       4,   3 Nov 11 18:10 /dev/tty3
crw-------    1 root     root     217, 168 Apr 11  2002 /dev/tty4
crw-------    1 root     root       4,   5 Nov 11 16:26 /dev/tty5
crw-------    1 root     root       4,   6 Nov 11 16:26 /dev/tty6
crw--w----    1 root     tty        4,   7 Apr 11  2002 /dev/tty7
crw--w----    1 root     tty        4,   8 Apr 11  2002 /dev/tty8
crw--w----    1 root     tty        4,   9 Apr 11  2002 /dev/tty9

Thanks for your help.

Bill