Bizzare paranoia of /bin/login on 3b2

[Sean Casey]

In article <174 at chinet.UUCP> djc at chinet.UUCP (David J. Carpenter) writes:
>I have experienced a bizzare problem with logging in on the console
>on our 3b2.  Here's what would happen:  Unix: would send  login: , I
>would reply, then Unix would send Login incorrect immediately without
>asking for a password.
>...

We had the same problem here, that is, until our 3b2 died altogether.  I
tracked it down to the routine getpass(), which was returning a null
password because it couldn't open /dev/tty.  For some reason, only the
console couldn't open /dev/tty.  When I talked to AT&T, he explained that
the console was driven by a "pseudodriver" and the problem was probably in
the driver.  When I asked how the driver could suddenly go bad, he
responded "file system corruption", and told me to do a partial restore.
So maybe doing a partial restore would help.  We didn't get to, because
our machine refused to boot from floppy, and a long chain of problems
ended up in a complete reformat and reload, but the reload didn't take
for some reason and now we have a quite dead 3b2.  I really don't buy
the technician's excuse, but at this point, it doesn't really matter.





-- 

-  Sean Casey                           UUCP:   sean at ukma.UUCP   or
-  Department of Mathematics                    {cbosgd,anlams,hasmed}!ukma!sean
-  University of Kentucky               ARPA:   ukma!sean at ANL-MCS.ARPA