We have a virtual environment with one of the larger, well-known data centers. They had a problem today resulting from a bug introduced during a recent firmware update. It basically left all of our VMs in a rather inconsistent state. I was unable to log in via SSH or the console and had to send a Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart them as gracefully as possible.

Most came up cleanly while a couple needed a fsck on one of their partitions. There are two others that have major issues with the console, though.

I can log in via SSH and perform any needed work, but logging in on the console results in the password being echoed back to me and having to hit enter a couple times before getting a prompt. One won't log in at all and the other will log in but requires I enter every command twice.

At one point it would even require I run a command like this:
At that point it would then run the command. Afterward it only required I run it twice.

Anyone know what I can look at to troubleshoot this?

I had similar with some RedHat 3 servers once, never found a solution although my workaround on the console was to use alt+F2 to open a different console and THAT worked fine. To this day I've no idea why!

Interesting. Switching to console 2 also worked for me. I wonder why that is.

Dumb question: RHEL 6, where do I configure the virtual consoles. I opened up /etc/inittab but there isn't anything in there as I'm used to seeing. Is there a new file or is RHEL 6 designed to start up the six default VCs no matter what?

*Edit: Turns out iptables was misconfigured. Got that sorted and now I can SSH to the server. Still curious about the virtual console configuration, though.