vtdaemon

[William Pribble]

Hello all,

What exactly is the vtdaemon, what does it do and how does it work?

Also, what would happen if I turned it off?

Thanks in advance.

[steven Burgess_2]

Hi

man vtdaemon

HTH

Steve

[Robert-Jan Goossens · Accepted solution]

Hi,

What is vtdaemon, and why is it running ?

`vtdaemon' responds to requests from other systems on the LAN made by the
`vt' command. `vtdaemon' spawns a server to respond to each request that it
receives. Another function of `vtdaemon' is to create portals (callout
devices used by the uucp program `uucico') and to service portal requests
from other machines. The manual page vtdaemon(1M) has more details.

If no one on your LAN is going to `vt' or `uucico' to or from your system,
you can turn the vtdaemon off. To kill the current vtdaemon without
rebooting, send it SIGTERM:

# ps -ef | grep -E PID\|vtdaemon
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME COMMAND
root 671 1 0 Dec 7 ? 0:00 /usr/sbin/vtdaemon
root 3455 2521 4 17:27:15 ttyp3 0:00 grep -E PID|vtdaemon
# kill 671 # or `kill -TERM 671'
# ps -p 671
PID TTY TIME COMMAND

To prevent vtdaemon from starting up at boot time, edit the file
"/etc/rc.config.d/vt" to change the value of VTDAEMON_START=1 to be
VTDAEMON_START=0. Then reboot.

Hope it helps,

Robert-Jan.

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Elaine,

From the man pages...

vtdaemon - respond to vt requests

vtdaemon responds to requests from other systems (via local area network) made by vt (see vt(1) ). vtdaemon spawns a server to respond to each request that it receives

vt - log into another system over lan

vt enables a user to log into another HP 9000 system (nodename) over an HP local area network. The -p option causes vt to send a poll request over the local area network to find out what systems currently have vtdaemon running (see vtdaemon(1M) ). An asterisk (*) following a nodename in the response indicates that the system is a vt gateway. Plus signs (+) following the nodename indicate how many vt gateways must be traversed to reach that system.

Fairly old & unused (for us at least) utility. Should, in most cases, be safe to turn off.

To do so use the following:

To stop these daemons from starting, change PTYDAEMON_START and VTDAEMON_START from a 1 to a 0 in the /etc/rc.config.d/ptydaemon and /etc/rc.config.d/vt files, respectively. The system must be either rebooted for these changes to take effect, or you can stop both daemons manually by typing the following commands:

/sbin/init.d/ptydaemon stop
/sbin/init.d/vt stop

BUT I would NOT stop ptydaemon nor prevent it from starting as it doles out ptys to other processes.

HTH,
Jeff

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi,

vtdaemon responds to the "vt" requests, another mechanism to log onto the system, sent by other systems. Look at the man page of vt.

If your users are not using vt, then you can turn it off and it is not going to affect anything.

-Sri