[PLUG] Mac OS X: when good consoles go bad

[Paul Heinlein]

I'm such a Mac newbie that I'm reluctant to post messages like this 
for fear that my supervisors might figure out that I shouldn't even be 
touching these machines, but here goes nothing. :-)

Our two OS X rack-mount servers are connected to a KVM. One of our 
long-time Mac users was showing me the cool ">console" login trick, 
whereby you can get a text-mode login screen.

In our setup, for some reason, the text-mode screen disappears after 
about five seconds, leaving me with a blank blue GUI screen. I.e., the 
console was gone, the mouse was active, but no windows or mouse 
actions were available. I have a feeling that the problem is related 
to our KVM, but I haven't confirmed that.

Otherwise, however, the machine was operating normally. I was able to 
use ssh to login to it without any trouble, and all services were 
functioning normally. If it were a Linux box, I'd say that X was 
running but xdm/gdm/kdm was hung somewhere.

We tried all sorts of keyboard tricks to get a login screen (text or 
GUI, we didn't care), all to no avail.

Finally, I logged in using ssh and poked around the process table. I 
saw this bit floating around:

root     11204   0.0  0.0    18072    292  ??  Ss+   1:39PM   0:00.12 
/usr/libexec/getty std.9600 console

Once I killed it, the regular GUI login window reappeared.

So I tried it again, thinking that maybe I needed to keep the 
keystokes a-flowin' to avoid the timeout. No luck. I got my username 
entered when, like before, I got a blank GUI screen. This time, 
however, the stuck process was login:

root     11191   0.0  0.0    27408    516  ??  Ss+   2:17PM   0:00.14 
login -p1 heinlein

Once I killed that process, the login window materialized once again.

Wierd, eh?

The only thing that occurs to me is that our KVM might not provide all 
the feedback necessary for maintaining a 9600 baud getty session, 
though I don't know where the hangup would be.

--Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>