"Respawning too fast" errors after updates

[bill at horne.net (Bill Horne)]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Christoph Doerbeck A242369" <cdoerbec at cso.fmr.com>

>Bill Horne (bill at horne.net) wrote:

> > Last Thursday, I manually started the RH "up2date" program in response
> > to the RedHat errata note about glibc and MySQL. The up2date run went
> > without error:
> >
> > [Thu Nov  7 22:41:16 2002] up2date installing packages:
> > ['MAKEDEV-3.3-4',
> > 'dev-3.3-4',
> > 'glibc-2.2.4-31',
> > 'glibc-common-2.2.4-31',
> > 'glibc-devel-2.2.4-31',
> > 'iptables-1.2.5-3',
> > 'krb5-devel-1.2.2-15',
> > 'krb5-libs-1.2.2-15',
> > 'modutils-2.4.18-3.7x',
> > 'nscd-2.2.4-31',
> > 'xinetd-2.3.9-0.71',
> > 'ypserv-2.5-2.7x']
> >
> > Google and rh archive searches indicate that a "respawning" issue may
> > be a problem with glibc, but I didn't find a specific mention of my
> > situation.
> >
> > I commented out the tty4, tty5, and tty6 lines in /etc/inittab, and
> > that has eliminated the problem for now.
>
> Q's:
>   No further details on what it is that's respawning?

It's the mingetty for TTY4.

>  If you're running a X11 session, did you CTL-ATL-F1 to see what's on the
console?
>   Run xconsole while it's happening.... see if anything new pops up.

It's happening at init level 3 without X running.

>
>   Maybe enabling some additional logging in /etc/syslog.conf might
>   give better clues?

Please tell me what entry(ies) I should change.

>
>   Can you post your /etc/inittab & a complete block of the errors?

#
# inittab       This file describes how the INIT process should set up
#               the system in a certain run-level.
#
# Author:       Miquel van Smoorenburg, <miquels at drinkel.nl.mugnet.org>
#               Modified for RHS Linux by Marc Ewing and Donnie Barnes
#

# Default runlevel. The runlevels used by RHS are:
#   0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#   1 - Single user mode
#   2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have
networking)
#   3 - Full multiuser mode
#   4 - unused
#   5 - X11
#   6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#
id:3:initdefault:

# System initialization.
si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit

l0:0:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 0
l1:1:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 1
l2:2:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 2
l3:3:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 3
l4:4:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 4
l5:5:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 5
l6:6:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 6

# Things to run in every runlevel.
ud::once:/sbin/update

# Trap CTRL-ALT-DELETE
ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t3 -r now

# When our UPS tells us power has failed, assume we have a few minutes
# of power left.  Schedule a shutdown for 2 minutes from now.
# This does, of course, assume you have powerd installed and your
# UPS connected and working correctly.
pf::powerfail:/sbin/shutdown -f -h +2 "Power Failure; System Shutting Down"

# If power was restored before the shutdown kicked in, cancel it.
pr:12345:powerokwait:/sbin/shutdown -c "Power Restored; Shutdown Cancelled"


# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
# 2002-11-08 Removed tty4, tty5, es tty6 to stop respawning errors (ewh)
#4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
#5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
#6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6

# Run xdm in runlevel 5
# xdm is now a separate service
x:5:respawn:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon

The only errors I get are the ones I cited: 'Id "4" respawning too fast ...'

>
>   Last, have you rebooted since the upgrade?

Yes, several times.

>
> I don't see why MySQL would be respawning.  That's usually an init
> problem. My initial instinct would be not waste time with MySQL.
> Either it starts or it doesn't...  it's shouldn't be respawning...

I don't think this is a MySQL problem. I upgraded glibc in response to the
RedHat notice, in part because it would cure a *potential* MySQL problem on
my other machine but mostly because it was recommended from RH.  I don't run
MySQL on this machine. I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear.

I'll also add that I do NOT know if this is caused by the new version of
glibc: the searches I did suggest it as a possibility, but I didn't find a
specific example of this problem.

Bill