Delete and break don't work on my 3B2

[Reza Taheri]

   Delete and break have stopped working on an AT&T 3B2-400 I use.  I am
posting everything I know about the problem so I won't lead people into
thinking about a possible cause that I have already ruled out.

   We have connected a port of our 3B2 400 to the outgoing Datakit line
and we use cu over that line to get to Datakit.  One day as I was logged
on to a remote machine through cu, the line dropped and I got back
to shell on my remote machine.  For some reason the cu process didn't
die and I couldn't even kill it.  Apparently, it was waiting for some
high priority I/O.  I finally disconnected the cable to the Datakit
outlet and the cu process died after a while (but not immediately).
After that I discovered that delete and break didn't work.  Obviously,
I checked my terminal first.  We tried using different terminals
with no success.  I tried connecting to a different port, even a
different ports board and even the console.  Still no luck.  Note
that if I type something and hit delete and then return, shell doesn't
see the typed characters, that is the input buffer is flushed, but
I don't get a carriage return by hitting delete or break.  I can't stop
ongoing output or a running process with delete or break, either.

   (My diagnosis is that since cu has to transmit break and delete
to the remote system, it catches them.  Now, even though my connection
is over, there is a flag somewhere that still tells the machine to
ignore delete and break.)

   What's even more perplexing is that delete and break work iff
one is logged in as the root on the console (but not when you come
in as user and later do an su on any terminal, including the console).
We even rebooted the system to no avail.

   Any ideas?
 
H. Reza Taheri
...!ihnp4!ihuxn!reza
(312)-979-7473