tty’s killed on Ubuntu Hardy Heron VPS

If you’ve upgraded your Ubuntu VPS to 8.04 check your syslog. It could happen that getty processes are being killed all the time:

May  2 06:28:54 vps_server init: tty3 main process (19690) terminated with status 1
May  2 06:28:54 vps_server init: tty3 main process ended, respawning
May  2 06:28:59 vps_server init: tty6 main process (19753) terminated with status 1
May  2 06:28:59 vps_server init: tty6 main process ended, respawning
May  2 06:29:00 vps_server init: tty5 main process (19764) terminated with status 1
May  2 06:29:00 vps_server init: tty5 main process ended, respawning
May  2 06:29:00 vps_server init: tty1 main process (19772) terminated with status 1
May  2 06:29:00 vps_server init: tty1 main process ended, respawning
May  2 06:29:02 vps_server init: tty4 main process (19891) terminated with status 1
May  2 06:29:02 vps_server init: tty4 main process ended, respawning
May  2 06:29:02 vps_server init: tty2 main process (19892) terminated with status 1
May  2 06:29:02 vps_server init: tty2 main process ended, respawning
...

To get rid of this (you don’t need terminals on remote machine) edit files /etc/event.d/tty1, /etc/event.d/tty2, etc and comment lines that causes respawning:

respawn
exec /sbin/getty 38400 tty1

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 1:09 am and is filed under Operating systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “tty’s killed on Ubuntu Hardy Heron VPS”

  1. Andrew Oakley Says:
    May 22nd, 2008 at 2:36 pm

    I had this problem on my Hardy VPS (upgraded from Gutsy, on a HyperVM OpenVZ), but commenting out the respawn/exec lines seemed to cause my VPS to become unreachable (crash?).

    Instead:

    sudo mkdir /root/event.d.backup
    sudo mv /etc/event.d/tty1 /root/event.d.backup/
    sudo mv /etc/event.d/tty2 /root/event.d.backup/
    sudo mv /etc/event.d/tty3 /root/event.d.backup/
    sudo mv /etc/event.d/tty4 /root/event.d.backup/
    sudo mv /etc/event.d/tty5 /root/event.d.backup/
    sudo mv /etc/event.d/tty6 /root/event.d.backup/

    …then rebooting, seemed to fixed the problem and the VPS remained in operation.

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