I have a Solaris 8 server and when I try to log into the console, after I enter the username and password, I get the message

"ttymon cannot allocate controlling tty on /dev/console. There may be another session active on this port".

Then when I try to log in again on the console or any of the desktops, it is not taking any keyboard entries. I type and nothing echos back or inputs.

Any ideas?
Christine

Hi,

Have you done anything before that problem ( any patch installation, for example ) ?
Can you login remotely ? If you do, do a ps -ef | grep cons .
Are you using dtlogin ?

I found out the reason I could type was that the keyboard went bad just as I was trying this. So typing isn't a problem.

My only problem is the error "ttymon cannot allocate controlling tty on /dev/console there may be another session active on this port".

I am able to remotely log in. I only get that message at the console after I enter a username but before the password.

I looked at ps and /usr/lib/saf/ttymon is running and references /dev/console but the time for that seems to change with each login attempt. There have been no new patches installed on this machine.

I'm selecting command-line-login from the screen for the session.

Thanks for any help, its really important.

Hi,

Kill the ttymon process and let init start it again, automatically... after that, try to log in at the console again... see if there are any messages on /var/adm/messages...

Good luck !

I killed it and it just started another and I still couldn't get in. Any other suggestions?

I do see 3 /usr/lib/saf/ttymon processes started. 2 started last week and the other this week. What starts them?

THanks

You should kill all of them... there're that many processes running because of your failure attempts to logon... so, kill all the ttymon processes, inittab has a line that will respawn a new process if there're none running...

Hi,

That didn't do anything. I can't reboot this machine either. Any other suggestions?

Thanks