topic Re: System Console Locked Help in Operating System - HP-UX

System Console Locked Help

Laurie A. Krumrey — Thu, 17 May 2001 15:19:54 GMT

I typed this:

view /etc/fstab > fstab.out

and now my console is locked and I can't
control c out..

Help

Laurie

Re: System Console Locked Help

James R. Ferguson — Thu, 17 May 2001 15:27:35 GMT

Hi Laurie:

Simply login somewhere else (telnet, etc.) and do:

# ps -ef|grep view

Find the pid of the hung 'view' and 'kill' it.

...JRF...

Re: System Console Locked Help

Laurie A. Krumrey — Thu, 17 May 2001 15:37:53 GMT

I didn't mention all telnet is down.

I got in by doing a ctrl-B and going into CM
Mode, I couldn't break the vi(ew) command I did
and then a RS to reboot.

We had a disk crash and all telnet and disk
is out, I'm trying to re-create.

I hope it comes backup up..it's at another site.

Re: System Console Locked Help

Alan Riggs — Thu, 17 May 2001 17:26:03 GMT

General hint:

When working on the console, especially on a system that has lost remote access, use tsm.

Tsm allows you to run multiple shells through a console interface. It is ideal for recovering from just the sort of lock up you experienced.

Re: System Console Locked Help

Jordan Bean — Fri, 18 May 2001 05:44:59 GMT

view? Isn't that just vi? ctrl-C won't work anyway... even though you can't see what you're doing, you still be able to enter hit ESC and enter :q! to exit vi and get back to the shell. Tell me if I'm wrong.

Re: System Console Locked Help

Laurie A. Krumrey — Fri, 18 May 2001 12:16:26 GMT

Well, I was using Web Console and control C
or the Escape key would not break me out of
the eternal vi mode.

I don't remember what I did to fix this, yesterday was a bad day. I think I went
into Control B and into

CM Mode (whatever that is)
and type rs

and that seemed to fix it.

If you want to lock up your telnet session
type

view filename > filename.out

You'll see what I mean...
Not pretty...

Re: System Console Locked Help

Sorrel G. Jakins — Fri, 18 May 2001 14:36:49 GMT

Pardon me if I am stating the obvious, but...

I think you probably want to use
cat filename>filename.out

Re: System Console Locked Help

Jordan Bean — Fri, 18 May 2001 19:49:02 GMT

I personally have never used the web console, so I don't know what it expects control keys to be. I'd like to see as what the interrupt key is defined (^C or DEL or whatever) by looking at the result of stty -a.

Re: System Console Locked Help

Laurie A. Krumrey — Fri, 18 May 2001 20:05:08 GMT

intr=^C and eof=^D on the Web Console, but
what it doesn't work...Vi can be dangerous

and quit=^\ (which I didn't know about)

Web console you can't do a copy and paste
and you can only do a screen print.

Unix is so fun, but Web Consoles are
even more fun...Laurie

Re: System Console Locked Help

A. Clay Stephenson — Fri, 18 May 2001 20:30:17 GMT

Hi Laurie,

I know it's too late now - but you were not
actually in all that terrible a mess (at least initially). First your view > xxx had redirected standard output but you still had standard input. All you really had to do was ":q!" to exit view and all would have been well. In this particular case, ctrl-c (SIGINT) would have done you no good because vi traps it. By the way, don't be afraid to use ctrl-c - it almost always does no harm.

You did well in that you actually knew the command that did you in.

I would urge you to learn one lesson that few sys admins take to heart - use kill -9 as a weapon of absolute last resort. It does no cleanup and shared memory segments are left,
tmp files are left, and sometimes databases are unrecoverable.

Just food for future thought, Clay

Re: System Console Locked Help

Laurie A. Krumrey — Fri, 18 May 2001 20:52:27 GMT

Well I forgot to mention my system had crashed
and I had no other telnet's available. I only
had the one web console with no physical console. So when I tried all my vi exit
commands

ZZ
:q!
Control C
Control D
I must have hit the escape key - twenty million
types and still I was not breaking my
connection. I tried them all several times..
(let's see insanity is trying the same thing
over and over again and excepting different
results..Yes I was there)

Web Console is not friendly..I would have loved
to do a kill -9, I use that command a lot..
but I had no other way of getting into my
box...It was just a bad day to make that kind
of error... Never do "view filename > output"
Never never never again...

Today is good..I got the server back manually..
Thanks..Laurie

Re: System Console Locked Help

Jordan Bean — Mon, 21 May 2001 16:03:40 GMT

I've been able to suspend vi (aka: e, edit, ex, vedit, view) with ctrl-Z (stty susp) and terminate it with kill -HUP %1 or kill -TERM %1. (Of course, I don't use SIGKILL, and SIGINT is trapped.)