Console problem....I give up....continued.....

[Kathleen]

I posted a problem with not being able to login to my console yesterday. Thanks to everyone who responded.

We lost power to our building last night and had to bring the system down. Upon reboot....amazingly enough, I could login to the terminal. But there were more strange problems:( At that point, after I logged in as root, it appeared that every line from the boot up status would appear as I hit the enter key to get to the next line. I had to hit enter several times to get to a blank line. Clear did not fix the problem. Why would this happen?
Once I got to a blank line, I could continue as usual. The only problem I encountered was when I tried to enter into OMADMIN and I got some strange emulation problem....that I am not sure how to fix. Nothing looked like it should have on our old system.
In my process of trying different terminal types, I have now locked myself out of being able to login as root. Sigh.
Does anyone have an suggestions as to why I had all the status lines from my boot up show when I was first able to login as root...line by line as I hit enter. OR how I might fix the OMADMIN emulation problem?
Thanks again for all of the help yesterday!

[Sridhar Bhaskarla · Accepted solution]

Looks like you have a TERM problem.

On your console, try setting the Term type to HP, vt220 etc and see which one works.

The fine test to check whether the terminal is working or not is with clear command. When ran, it should clear the display without any garbage.

-Sri

[Patrick Wallek]

Seeing the output the way you did, and having to hit ENTER numerous times to get to a blank line indicates to me a problem with your TERM environment variable.

What type of console is this? Is it an HP (700/92, 700/96, 2392, etc.) or something else?

It sounds as if the TERM is just not getting set appropriately when you log in.

[Kathleen]

HP 700/96

[linuxfan]

HI Kathleen,

You have a 700/96 console, Not sure if you know how to change the terminal setting, but here you go.

/Begin/
On the keyboarrd, between F5 and F8
press
then press
then (which is config keys)
then (which is terminal config)
then using the arrow buttons, go down to lowermost right corner to TERM Mode,
once that is highlighted, press for next choice, here you can select either EM100 or HP
then to save your config .

/End/

See if that makes your console any better. if not at that point you can compare the other variables with a working console.

-HTH
Ramesh

[Kathleen]

But its changing right there...on the terminal...and not settings in some file somewhere....that needs to be changed?

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Kathleen,

I assume you have a hp 700/96 console terminal. When you login as root and if your terminal emulation is set as vt220 or something like that, u will face that problem of screen not clearing when you "clear" it and boot message appearing when you press enter.

Just change your emulation to hp and export. It will work fine. Happens all the time to me when i reboor the box and don't change the emulation.

Do this
TERM=hp
export TERM
or you can do this
export TERM=hp

This should fix you terminal issue.

You have to use the same emulation ("hp") if you login as any user from the console. If you do a telnet and login you can use "vt220" as your terminal emulation.

Hope this helps

Thanks

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

try stty sane
and as mentioned above export TERM=hp

Bill

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi

Ramesh's suggestion stores the settings on a chip on the consoles motherboard and are not lost when you turn it off/on.

As many have said strange screen displays are normally due to an emulation problem.


# TERM=hp or vt100 or wy60 or vt220
Then
# export TERM
Will normally cure the problem.

You stated that you tried to run OMADMIN -

Running anything other than essential systems administration commands on a console is NOT recommended as the console is the system admins last line of defence and from there very often miracles can be achieved ? or so the users believe.

If you run applications other than these essential sys admin ones and they fail / lock then you have removed a big safety net.

I speak from experience and I am sure we all have in the past locked the console when it was at that time the only way to communicate with the server and so had to reboot to fix it ? but this type of reboot is not very elegant ? power off / on, which is fraught with potential dangers.

So to run applications telnet to the server and leave the console for only essential work.


;-)

Paula

[melvyn burnard]

One thing that does not appear to have beenm suggested is to hard reset the terminal.


power of the 700/96
hold the d key down, an dpower the terminal back on still holding the d key.
release the d key after about 10 seconds, it shoul dbeep an dthen display a message telling you it is using defaults, presss return to continue.

press the return key

check to see if this helped.

[linuxfan]

Hi Kathleen,


Another thought is to login from a remote machine and rename .profile .profile.old

-Regards
Ramesh

[Darrell Allen]

Hi Kathleen,

Pardon me if these suggestions are too elementary but I thought I would write them anyway.

On an HP 700/96 you can clear the screen with 2 keystrokes: on the top row just to the right of F8 is a key with a triangle pointing to the upper left - that's takes the cursor to the "home" position (first character on first line on display buffer). 2 keys to it's right is the clear display key. Press the cursor home then the clear display and the screen is cleared.

You ask about TERM being set in a file. It is normally set it /etc/profile and perhaps the user's .profile as well. I have known admins to hardcode values in one or both of these files (which really aggravetes me) and defeats the logic built into the profile script that sets TERM to match your terminal.

As Ramesh says, you can change the setting on the terminal itself to emulate either an HP or EM100 terminal. If /etc/profile or the user's .profile hasn't been altered then TERM should get set correctly. Here's the snippet from /etc/profile that sets TERM:

# set term if it's not set

if [ "$TERM" = "" -o "$TERM" = "unknown" -o "$TERM" = "dialup" -o "$TERM" = "network" ]
then
eval `ttytype -s -a`
fi

export TERM