[wplug] pty/tty

[Rick Smith]

Did running some program instigate this?  I saw an error similar
to this in ssh running on HP-UX (which has or had a more braindead
method of mgmt of ptys), which was given when the code opened
a tty but not the pty side of the pair (or was it the other way
around?).  So it didn't run out, it was just poor coding.
Thankfully, source is available to hack up, and have it try the
next pair when just one side failed.

Under Linux, I saw a message like this once when running something
on my shell account at my ISP.  That is set up using some type
of virtual environment where it looks like I have a complete
machine to myself, even though the machine may be hosting others.
I was trying to run talk or kibitz or something like that which
needed pty pairs to work.  I don't remember what it was, but the most
excellent sys admin there fixed it. 

Are you running a large number of things like ssh, telnet,
rlogin, xterms (which you said none), or such, you may have run
out.  `ps ax` show anything funny (many old processes holding
ptys open)?  Otherwise, what were you doing?

-- Rick


On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 12:56:56AM -0400, Adam Cecchetti wrote:
>
> I have the default 256, and there were no xterms running at the time I
> encountered this error.
> 
> Robert Dale sent: Thursday, April 19, 2001 7:46 PM
> 
> > On Thu, 19 Apr 2001, Adam Cecchetti wrote:
> > 
> > > I was presented with a rather odd request by my os this afternoon. 
> > > It said that there were not enough ptys and that i should contact
> > > my system adminstrator to make more.  Being that I'm the system
> > > admin the left me somewhat confused.  I never heard of creating
> > > more ptys and i was wondering if anyone had been presented with
> > > such a request before, and if so how i should go about creating
> > > more of them.  Thanks for any info that can be shed. 
> > 
> > What does `ls /dev/pty* | wc` give you?
> > 
> > Are you running an extraordinary amount of xterms?
> > 
> > The kernel default (atleast for 2.4 kernels) is 256.