[vox-tech] emergency: please help. /lib keeps disappearing

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bryan Richter (btrichter@ucdavis.edu):

> >    "init spawning too fast.  Disabling getty for 5 minutes"
> 
> Ken Bloom (I think?) mentioned a while back that getty is buggy, and he
> would get that message (I get it too, but I don't use the console enough
> to make it bother me). The fix was to use an alternate program like
> mingetty or something.

Quite so.  Works here. 
 
> Not that I see _any_ connection between a buggy getty and some hungry
> program eating /lib - this is just what I noticed first.

I don't have the foggiest idea what ate Peter's /lib.  Think that box
has a poltergeist, or sumpin'.

The symptom of the getty problem is lots of process-respawning messages,
typically citing tty2, which (however) turns out to be mysteriously
absent from output of ps and lsof. I vaguely recall that all manner of
system weirdness starts happening when you run low on some vital system
resource like file handles -- and that it's all caused by some known bug
in some particular version of the standard getty, which you sidestep
most easily by switching to mingetty, or some other alternative.

And, yeah, I probably read about it on vox-tech first, but have since
then seen mention of the syndrome elsewhere.

-- 
Cheers,                                      Right to keep and bear
Rick Moen                                  Haiku shall not be abridged
rick@linuxmafia.com                           Or denied.  So there.