INIT: Command is respawning too rapidly...

[Kuyper Hoffman]

In article <4665 at proxima.UUCP> jsd at proxima.UUCP (Jeremy Gryttpype Druker) writes:
>In article <1991Apr8.102837.12050 at hollie.rdg.dec.com> moore at forty2.enet.dec.com (Paul Moore) writes:
>>>Can someone help me with this problem when I boot up my ISC-based system. I get
>>>the following series of messages displayed on the terminal:
>>>
>>>    INIT: Command is respawning too rapidly. Check for possible errors
>>>
>>>    id: co "/etc/getty console console"
>[and a number of other inittab lines]
>
>...and thus answered slootman at dri.nl (Paul Slootman):
>
>>Ummm... Go to single user mode (or maintenance mode, depending on the
>>system). Check that
>>a) /etc/getty is there and has execute permission, or isn't damaged in
>>   any other way
>>b) /etc/gettydefs is there and contains the entries used by the various
>>   getty invocations, without errors (getty has a '-c file' option to
>>   check a gettydefs-type file)
>>c) the devices are there, i.e. /dev/console, /dev/vt01, etc. and that
>>   these devices are available (ports on an expansion IO module won't
>

Hmmmm, I had something real similar about 16 months ago.  I had been
fiddling in the file /etc/TIMEZONE and had inserted our local zone
name and Greenwhich offset, but being naturally cautious by nature
had decided to keep the original zone hashed out as a comment on the
line above our own zone.  Certainly it is allowable to have # comments
in /etc/TIMEZONE, so my file looked like this:

---------- /etc/TIMEZONE ----------
#ident	"@(#)adm:TIMEZONE	1.2"
#	Set timezone environment to default for this machine
# TZ=EST5EDT
TZ=SAT-2
export TZ
---------- EOF ----------

Some days later I rebooted the machine (without making any
configuration changes whatsoever.  Everything went kinda OK, but
would the damn thing boot properly, no way.... and as I remember it
the error that I got on the console was exactly what you describe,
so just check that you (or someone else) hasn't changed that file.
The problem seems to be that init scans the file blindly looking for
TZ (without parsing) and then uses the entire line and gets
hellishly confused by the #.

>I had exactly that same problem, (with Intel UNIX, which I believe
>is very similar to ISC) and battled for quite a while before
>ultimately reinstalling Unix :-(  Even weirder was that it
>happened twice in one week - to 2 different machines, both of
>which had been running happily for months!

Again, a change on Monday is seldom remembered on Wednesday....

> I could start TCP/IP and rlogin from another machine.

Can't remember if I could do this....

Hope this helps

Kuyper
-- 
|      Kuyper Hoffman                   |  Life is just a bowl of All-Bran |
|  kuyper at cside1.UUCP                   |  You wake up every morning       |
|  ....!ddsw1!olsa99!oct1!cside1!kuyper |  And it's there....              |
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