Mystery crash and /dev/con*

[bill]

Has anyone ever seen this problem, or can anyone else give me
additional information on this?

I have uPort 2.3L V/AT running on an old system. Occasionally
(every few months) the system will panic with a double fault.
This seems to happen when the modem on /dev/ttyM0 is either
in use or has just been in use within a few seconds. When you
reboot, the system says "INIT: LOGIN ERROR" or some such, and
throws you into S user mode. Unfortunately you can not type
anything. 

The solution is to reboot off of the floppy, fsck and mount
/dev/dsk/0s0, and go chmod 666 /dev/cons*. They seem to all 
be write only (222) for some reason. Occasionally they are
owned by someone besides root, as well. In any case, you sync
and umount, then reboot and it comes right up.

This is an infrequent problem, so it is not a big problem
(outside of taking me a while to track down the first time)
but I am curious as to the cause... Any ideas anyone???


-- 
Bill Mahoney
bill at zycor.UUCP
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