Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 25 Oct 2001 14:50:31 -0500
From:      "Martin G. McCormick" <martin@dc.cis.okstate.edu>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   The system has no more ptys.
Message-ID:  <200110251950.f9PJoVR52547@dc.cis.okstate.edu>

next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
	This is a relatively lightly-loaded FreeBSD system
with no more than 8 or 10 logins on a really busy day, but I am
starting to run out of TTY's on a regular basis.

	I discovered that I had a huge number of sh processes
running from a script I use that is misbehaving so I killed all
the Bourn shells and expect processes that were hanging around
using the old kill -9 Sledge hammer approach.

	The processes went away, but I didn't get any more TTY's
back.  If about 5 users or so are logged in, any attempt to spawn
a new shell fails with:

spawn csh
The system has no more ptys.  Ask your system administrator to create more.

	Okay, I understand what that means, but I have the
feeling that my killing rampage left some TTY's occupied and
there are probably enough when things are normal.

	I don't find any unusual messages in the log files such
as /var/log/messages or syslog and the ps acx command doesn't
produce anything out of the ordinary since I got rid of the 200
or so sh processes that were just lying there.

	Is there a good way to see the status of each TTY?  /dev
shows 32 ttyp# devices so one would think there should be more
than enough to go around for our group.

	If I use MAKEDEV to recreate the 32 pseudo TTY's, will
this knock off present users?

	FreeBSD is wonderful, but I have not run up against this
problem before and am trying to find the best way to correct it
soon.

Many thanks.

Martin McCormick 405 744-7572   Stillwater, OK
OSU Center for Computing and Information services Network Operations Group

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200110251950.f9PJoVR52547>