agetty spamming logs at Rackspace Cloud Gentoo server

I recently started using Rackspace Cloud Server environment to spin up a new Gentoo server for myself. The Cloud Server is pretty cool, and I’m finally starting to adopt it. Rackspace offers Gentoo images, which is great.

After starting up the base image I was beginning the tedious process of updating world and getting some of the packages I was requiring. After getting world updated, I rebooted to ensure that everything was working okay. Everything was fine, but agetty was spamming the crap out of my /var/log/messages with the following:

Jan 22 20:00:58 comp agetty[3475]: /dev/tty3: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:00:58 comp agetty[3476]: /dev/tty4: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:00:58 comp agetty[3477]: /dev/tty6: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:00:58 comp agetty[3478]: /dev/tty5: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:00:58 comp agetty[3479]: /dev/tty2: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:01:08 comp agetty[3491]: /dev/tty3: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:01:08 comp agetty[3492]: /dev/tty6: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:01:08 comp agetty[3493]: /dev/tty4: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:01:08 comp agetty[3495]: /dev/tty2: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:01:08 comp agetty[3494]: /dev/tty5: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:01:18 comp agetty[3497]: /dev/tty3: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:01:18 comp agetty[3498]: /dev/tty6: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:01:18 comp agetty[3499]: /dev/tty4: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:01:18 comp agetty[3500]: /dev/tty2: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:01:18 comp agetty[3501]: /dev/tty5: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:01:28 comp agetty[3503]: /dev/tty6: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:01:28 comp agetty[3504]: /dev/tty3: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:01:28 comp agetty[3505]: /dev/tty4: cannot open as standard input: No such device Jan 22 20:02:28 comp init: Id "c4" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes Jan 22 20:02:28 comp init: Id "c2" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes Jan 22 20:02:28 comp init: Id "c3" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes Jan 22 20:02:28 comp init: Id "c6" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes Jan 22 20:02:28 comp init: Id "c5" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

I initially figured it was related to udev, but searches were also leading me to potential issues with the kernel, etc. Long story short, I was able to figure it out. I think it was related to baselayout update and file I accepted. If you’re encountering this, check your /etc/inittab under TERMINALS. Only c1 should be commented out. I discovered this by creating a new server in the cloud with Gentoo, and viewing that inittab.. and sure enough, my new inittab had ALL ttys available.

Change this….

# TERMINALS c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty1 linux c2:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty2 linux c3:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty3 linux c4:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty4 linux c5:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty5 linux c6:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty6 linux

To this

# TERMINALS c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty1 linux #c2:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty2 linux #c3:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty3 linux #c4:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty4 linux #c5:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty5 linux #c6:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty6 linu

Then you’ll need to load this (or reboot). To load it by issuing the following command:

telinit q

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