System Console Locked Help

[Laurie A. Krumrey]

I typed this:

view /etc/fstab > fstab.out

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

Help

Laurie

[James R. Ferguson]

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...

[Laurie A. Krumrey]

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.

[Alan Riggs · Accepted solution]

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.

[Jordan Bean]

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.

[Laurie A. Krumrey]

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...

[Sorrel G. Jakins]

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

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

[Jordan Bean]

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.

[Laurie A. Krumrey]

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

[A. Clay Stephenson]

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

[Laurie A. Krumrey]

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

[Jordan Bean]

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.)