What's wrong with my inittab?

[Greg Limes]

[showing off my ignorance to the world again, but what's new]

In article <2048 at csuna.csun.edu> abcscnge at csuna.csun.edu (Scott "The
Pseudo-Hacker" Neugroschl) complains about his System-V box starting a
getty for a serial port, and having a "ps -ef" line that reflects that
its controlling TTY is "?".

Scott, all my experience is on BSDish boxes, but it seems to me that
this would be the same across both sides of the world. Commonly, this
happens when the "getty" is attempting to open a serial port with
hardware carrier detect set up, and is being blocked in the open()
call until the serial line's DCD line.

Look carefully at where the genederchangers and nullmodems end up
connecting pin 8 on your VME box's interface. This is probably the
signal that needs to be asserted before your getty is freed to
execute. This is just a guess, it may be pin 6 or even somewhere
strange; check your documentation for specifics.

If your AT box is kind enough to assert DTR only when the port is
open, connect the PC's DTR (probably on pin 20) to the VME's DCD
(again, probably on pin 8); when the PC "dials up" the VME, it will
open the gates for the getty. The benefit of this arrangement is that
if the PC hangs up (drops DTR), the session on the VME box will
(probably) be killed off.

This is all generalizing from another varient of unix, thus all the
weasal wording ... hope it puts you onto the track of the problem.

-- Greg Limes [limes at sun.com]
   Nearly Reformed Hacker
--
Greg Limes	limes at sun.com	...!sun!limes	73327,2473	[chose one]