Id “c1” respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

You may see the tty device error messages like ‘/dev/tty1: cannot open as standard input: Permission denied’ in the server logs and many more like

Jan 10 xx:xx:xx [agetty] /dev/tty1: cannot open as standard input: Permission denied
Jan 10 xx:xx:xx [agetty] /dev/tty2: cannot open as standard input: Permission denied
Jan 10 xx:xx:xx [agetty] /dev/tty3: cannot open as standard input: Permission denied
Jan 10 xx:xx:xx [init] Id “c1” respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
Jan 10 xx:xx:xx [init] Id “c2” respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
Jan 10 xx:xx:xx [init] Id “c3” respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

The tty “Permission denied” error message is because of the misconfiguration in your /etc/inittab file in which case you have to edit the file and comment the agetty/getty lines. Login to your server as root and edit the file:

pico /etc/inittab

Search for the lines

c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty1 linux

and comment the lines by placing a # in front of them.

Save the file and you won’t see the messages.

OR

you may try re-creating the terminals again from shell as root. Login to your server as root and execute the command:

/sbin/makedev /dev/tty1

and replace 1 with 2,3,4,5,6,7 for other terminals and reboot the server.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 and is filed under Linux Administration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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