Mgetty won't start from inittab
 

I have mgetty set up to allow dialin. During the day I connect to the internet using wvdial via cron, 9-11am 12-2pm 3-5pm. During these times I have been using mgetty to listen in the background via inittab. Obviously during the above hours mgetty sees the modem lockfile and waits for the line to come free. The system has worked very well unill recently when the modem needed resetting.

After resetting the modem and a system reboot Mgetty will not start from inittab. tried init q counless times and checked over system logs but cannot see anything which explains why inittab will not start mgetty. mgetty will however run from the command line. I've looked for stale lock files and cant find any.

heres the entry in inittab

#modem getty
S0:235:respawn:/usr/sbin/mgetty -D -n 2 ttyS0

just in case inittab was defective I copied an old inittab from backup but still no joy.

mgetty logs are no help since they log only after mgetty is run.
when run from command line mgetty logs look fine.


What else should I check?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Corbiere

It looks like you covered everything on the mgetty side.

I saw similar problem with mgetty not starting and somehow
running minicom on the modem and then quiting and rebooting
fixed the problem.

RE: [SLUG] mgetty won't start in inittab

I've seen the same solution but I don't have minicom on my system yet. its something to try but I'm sceptical.

addenum.
just installed and run minicom on same modem. can connect to isp no problem. Mgetty still won't run from inittab!.