Console password not hidden... echoing clear text back to screen.

[Rick Braman]

Hi,

I'm running HP-UX 11i on a K-460 box. Last week someone had been messing around on the console and we had a boot failure because the system could not recognize an attached console. We thought we had the problem fixed, but now when you login, the password echos back to the screen so you can read in in clear text. Is there a setting in the console that turns this echo off? It seems pretty straight forward, but I've gone through all of the console screens that I could and couldn't find anything that sounds like what I'm trying to do.

Any and all input would be greatly appreciated!

Rick

[Steven E. Protter]

I've seen this before.

Usually its due to a failure of the console or you need to get the settings back to default.

Ctrl-shift-d or something like that at startup should clear it.

SEP

[T G Manikandan · Accepted solution]

Reset your console to the default settings by


Switch off the console
Press "Shift + d"
Switch on the console terminal
Release "shift + d" after 10 seconds

[Rick Braman]

That did the trick... thanks guys!

[Bill Hassell]

To explain what happened, the console terminal had local echo turned on. Normally, Unix systems always echo whatever you type as a reliable way to indicate that something is listening at the computer. When you trun local echo on, then the keyboard places the character on the screen and sends the character to the computer. Thus, if the computer were disconnected, it would look normal because you would see what you typed, just no response to commands.