Catching up on mail today - looks like no one replied to you yet...

This sounds like a problem which is most common in environments with
long serial runs - university terminal labs, corporate unix installs...

If the serial cable picks up enough noise to send characters to the unix
host, the getty will eat CPU as '4th@#$g3' tries to log in... endlessly.

In your case, the 'login: ' prompt becomes the userid on the other
machine, and vice versa. Both machines are trying to login to the other.

Now, it seems odd that the machine just hung - I'd expect init to
shutdown getty on that port, and life would go on. What was your console
setup for that machine? (vga or serial?) Did you try to get into DDB?

							David


On Fri, Sep 28, 2001 at 05:36:48PM +0200, Arto Huusko wrote:
> 
> I ran into something odd one day, which admittedly was quite frustrating.
> 
> I have on one box tty00 configured "on" in /etc/ttys. I was working on one
> headless OpenBSD machine and needed to plug the serial cable somewhere.
> I had forgotten that tty00 is on in my NetBSD machine, and plugged the
> cable there. I turned the other machine on and after a little while
> the NetBSD machine's console showed something like
> 
> getty: exceeded running time, exiting
> 
> I lost all my virtual consoles, and what was worse I could not
> ssh/telnet to the box. Or, IIRC, I couldn't telnet... didn't try ssh at
> the time. I deemed the thing dead and hit reset.
> 
> 
> So, what's up and what happened. In any case, I shouldn't be able to
> lock down the machine in that way (the exception being that I fry
> the machine when plugging serial cables with power on).
> 
> Or could I have done something else?
> 
> -- 
> Arto Huusko (arto.huusko@utu.fi) | Diving Is Fun
> 

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net -->
(About an Amiga rendering landscapes) It's not thinking, it's being artistic!
					      - Jamie Woods