[svlug] Terminal Logins

[Ray Olszewski]

Pieces of your last message are scattered in among my comments.

1. The getty you are using is probably the one from getty_ps. At least a Red
Hat system I looked at today was set up that way. This means the suggestion
below *should* work, if all were well (and the appropriate gettydefs entry
were used, as you seem to have done).

>> S1:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L 19200 ttyS1 vt102

2. A cable (or terminal) might work with minicom and echo but not with
getty. A lot of older vt100 terminals were "4-wire" terminals, using only
RS232 lines 2,3,7, and (I think) 20. Don't know what your is, of course.
Most important, they didn't support CD (line 8); also didn't support RTS/CTS
(lines 4 and 5). echo and minicom may not care about those lines, but getty
will unless you tell it to ignore them (with -L, I think, same as agetty ...
actually, this only deals with CD, but the proceses should look at CTS/RTS
only if hardware handshaking is enabled). 

3. I finally found the agetty inittab entry I have that worked for me
(connecting up another Linux box running minicom). Reproduced exactly
(except maybe for tabs vs spaces), it was:

s1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty   -Lw  38400 ttyS0  vt100

The w causes agetty to wait for a CR before issuing the login: prompt (I
added this so I could unplug the serial connection without generating
perpetual respawns until the kernel suspended the process). You know what
the rest means. Yours (below) differs slightly, but I can't see that the
differences would have caused the problems you describe.

>   Out of desperation, I typed /sbin/agetty -L 9600 ttyS1.  This did get
>me a valid login at the terminal, but nothing happened after I logged in.

4. After you respond to the login: and password: prompts, what does the
Linux box do? Does it respawn agetty? run some other process on ttyS1? What
does ps think is going on? Do you get any meaningful error reports from
agetty via syslog or to the console screen?

5. The core of your problem right now is not knowing if the problem is
(mainly) in the Linux box or the terminal. Why not try a serial connection
from a different Linux box, where you have good control over bps, parity,
RS232 lines, etc.?

------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski                                        -- Han Solo
762 Garland Drive
Palo Alto, CA  94303-3603
650.321.3561 voice     650.322.1209 fax          ray at comarre.com        
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