Okay, I feel like a moron all of a sudden.

I have one machine where I needed to restart sshd in order to get its logging to work. So, I had everyone here at the office log out of ssh on this machine, and proceeded, directly on the machine, to do a last-minute edit of the config files (for syslog and sshd) and restart both services.

Stupid me didn't pay attention to what virtual console he was using, which was tty2, which if I'm not mistaken gets all of the syslog messages.

I now have a completely locked up virtual console, which happened while I was in vim. I even killed that vim process from another console, to no effect whatsoever. Pressing alt+F2 still brings up the locked-up screen with vim syslog.conf staring me in the face.

Does anyone here know how I might kick this thing in the butt to free it?

Mind you, this is on a production machine that is working just fine at the moment.

Did I mention I feel stupid yet?

Thank you all very much for the help.

I suppose I should mention we're running Slackware 10.x (I inherited this position from someone else with little training and am still familiarizing myself with the environment).

I did a ps -ax|grep tty and found this:

1562 tty2 Ss+ 0:00 -bash

I'm not too sure I just want to kill that process, though.

Again, thanks for the help.

Sorry about three posts in a row but I thought I'd let you all know that I managed to solve this little problem finally. That's always a good feeling.

Thankyou all anyway.

how did you fix 9it, i have the same problem :S