Cannot Launch additional XTERM's

[Alzhy]

Guys.. any ideas here?

On our oft-busy dev server, users are o longer able to launch an "xterm" (no errors) but can still launch "dtterm". I checked our pty/nsrpty settings.. both are set to 1024 so I think we are not hitting any tty limit still.

A truss of xterm shows (a snippet):

stat("/dev/pty/ttyt6", 0x68ff19b8) ERR#2 ENOENT
write(6, "\0\0\003\0\0\002@ \0de( 03\0\0\r".., 1048) = 1048
read(7, "\0\0\0\0\0\0\002@ \0de( 03\0\0\r".., 1048) = 1048
close(4) = 0
open("/dev/ptym/clone", O_RDWR, 0120100) = 4
fstat(4, 0x68ff19b8) = 0
open("/dev/config", O_RDONLY|O_NDELAY, 0120100) = 5
ioctl(5, IOCONF_SEARCH, 0x68ff1ab0) = 0
ioctl(5, IOCONF_QUERY, 0x68ff1bb8) = 0
close(5) = 0
stat("/dev/pty/ttyt6", 0x68ff19b8) ERR#2 ENOENT
write(6, "\0\0\003\0\0\002@ \0de( 03\0\0\r".., 1048) = 1048
read(7, "\0\0\0\0\0\0\002@ \0de( 03\0\0\r".., 1048) = 1048
close(4) = 0
open("/dev/ptym/clone", O_RDWR, 0120100) = 4
fstat(4, 0x68ff19b8) = 0
open("/dev/config", O_RDONLY|O_NDELAY, 0120100) = 5
ioctl(5, IOCONF_SEARCH, 0x68ff1ab0) = 0
ioctl(5, IOCONF_QUERY, 0x68ff1bb8) = 0
close(5) = 0
stat("/dev/pty/ttyt6", 0x68ff19b8) ERR#2 ENOENT
write(6, "\0\0\003\0\0\002@ \0de( 03\0\0\r".., 1048) = 1048
read(7, "\0\0\0\0\0\0\002@ \0de( 03\0\0\r".., 1048) = 1048
close(4) = 0
open("/dev/ptym/clone", O_RDWR, 0120100) = 4
fstat(4, 0x68ff19b8) = 0
open("/dev/config", O_RDONLY|O_NDELAY, 0120100)

[Alzhy]

And my /dev/pts direcory has 2048 Entries!

Any ideas how to fix .. without a reboot?
The system has only about 120 xterm sessions and 150 telnet (TTY) sessions..

[David Child_1]

Just for clarification;

Are they starting the xterm from the command line? If they do, try leaving it in the foreground (e.g. not xterm &); do you get the prompt back? The reason may be someone may have defined an alias with a -display option (i.e. alias xterm="xterm -display 10.10.10.10").

David

[Alzhy]

negative... no alias. forground execution explicit "-display"..

[Wodisch]

Hi Nelson,

there are three different flavours of pseudo ttys, and TELNET, xterm and dtterm do not use the same flavour.
And you'll have to have to device files, too, not just the kernel parameters.
But you might be running out of other resources, so check the output of tools like
- netstat -an
- ipcs -mb
- sar -v 1 10

and your kernel's "nfile" and "maxfiles" might be too small!

FWIW,
Wodisch