On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, Donald Lee wrote:

> Possibly coincidentally, this second hang happened about the time that I
> did a "quit" on the Z-term session that I had been using to access the serial
> console on the machine.
>
> My theory is that the somewhat broken serial on the machine was blocking
> syslog because syslogd was trying to write to /dev/console.  Everything that
> generated a console message (like su) would eventually hang because of
> this blockage.
>
> Has anyone else seen anything like this?  Any opinions?

Do you have flow control on on the port?

Usually when terminal programs quit, they send a break sequence out the
serial port. That will usually put a kernel in ddb. When you fire the
terminal program back up, are you in ddb? If not, and if you have flow
control on on the port, the system may be seeing flow control going to
stop, hanging the console.

Take care,

Bill