editing /etc/inittab

[Gary S. Trujillo]

In article <724 at flatline.UUCP> erict at flatline.UUCP (J. Eric Townsend) writes:
> 
> From lenny's README that he packaged with his fsck/rc neato package.
> >(yes, you can edit /etc/inittab carefully).
> 
> What's the problem with editing /etc/inittab?  I've done this on
> a variety of UNIX systems for hte past couple of years...

I recently had an experience where I carelessly made a change to /etc/inittab
that resulted in several hours of trying to figure out why the phone manager
display ("VOICE 1:IDLE  DATA2:xxx"-where xxx is filled in by Lenny's phdaemon)
had disappeared.  (No, I don't use the phone manager, but I do like the display,
as it gives phdaemon a place to hang its hat.)  What happened is that I changed

:ph1:2:respawn:/usr/lib/uucp/uugetty -r -t60 ph1 1200

to

ph1:2:respawn:/usr/lib/uucp/uugetty -r -t60 ph1 1200

(no leading space), rather than to

 ph1:2:respawn:/usr/lib/uucp/uugetty -r -t60 ph1 1200

thinking to restart uugetty, which I had manually disabled while testing an
external modem on the serial port.  Even rebooting didn't help.  I assume
that the phone manager figured it wasn't wanted, since there was no device
for it to handle, so it just didn't bother starting up.
-- 
Gary S. Trujillo			      {linus,bbn,m2c}!spdcc!gnosys!gst
Somerville, Massachusetts		     {icus,ima,stech,wjh12}!gnosys!gst