On three NetBSD systems I administer, I occasionally see the console output
get wedged.  I've seen it happen at less than a week, a little over 60 days,
and a little over 120 days uptime.

By wedged, I mean that typing on the console keyboard has no visible effect
(actually it makes the cursor flicker slightly on macppc, but I get no
input) and processes that try to write to the console block indefinitely.
Everything that doesn't touch the console seems to continue to work fine.

The usual symptom of this is that syslogd stuffs up, which eventually causes
various programs that use syslog to back up as well.  Many services keep
working, but anything which would log to the console just blocks.  This is
especially problematic since 'su' logs to the console with the default
config.

Reconfiguring syslogd to just not log to the console (i.e. comment out the
/dev/console line in /etc/syslogd.conf) mostly solves the problem for me,
and is an acceptable solution in my case since all of these machines are
behind a kvm switch in a server closet and nobody's watching their consoles
anyhow.

I'd still like to figure out how to keep it from happening, since it makes
it impossible to log in via the console and seems to require a reboot to
fix, which ruins my uptime.  ;)

Has anyone else seen this happen?  It's possible that this is fixed in 1.6
(all these machines are running pre-1.6 kernels), but I'm curious if anyone
knows for sure.

For the record, the kernels I've seen this happen with are all ones I built,
but they're pretty close to GENERIC.  Two machines are running i386 1.5.2,
and one is running macppc 1.5ZC + some local patches.

Thanks,
-- monroe
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Monroe Williams                                  monroe@criticalpath.com