Using Rackspace’s Virtual Terminal (Emergency Console) I noticed that it appeared that my server was ‘hung’. After it gets to Starting Local [OK] there be nothing. No login prompt. Line breaks don’t register, etc. But I can SSH to the server, etc. It was up and not hung.

I kept feeling like it was related to TTY stuff. I know that Gentoo will have those inittab changes from time to time. I usually ‘zap’ them, but maybe I accepted or didn’t notice the issue. So the first step was to colordiff the current inittab with an older one from Nov 2020, and sure enough, I noticed something.

< c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty1 linux
< h0:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 hvc0 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
---
> c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty --noclear 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

So at some point I commented out c2, c3, c4, c5 and c6. I found the post here. I commented those out and added the h0 and wanted to reload the inittab. You can do this without rebooting by issuing this command:

telinit q

And bam.. login prompt showed up in the virtual terminal!