From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Oct 25 12:50:40 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from dc.cis.okstate.edu (dc.cis.okstate.edu [139.78.100.219]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1934537B403 for ; Thu, 25 Oct 2001 12:50:38 -0700 (PDT) Received: from dc.cis.okstate.edu (localhost.cis.okstate.edu [127.0.0.1]) by dc.cis.okstate.edu (8.11.3/8.11.3) with ESMTP id f9PJoVR52547 for ; Thu, 25 Oct 2001 14:50:32 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from martin@dc.cis.okstate.edu) Message-Id: <200110251950.f9PJoVR52547@dc.cis.okstate.edu> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: The system has no more ptys. Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 14:50:31 -0500 From: "Martin G. McCormick" Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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