Woody change affecting openvt

Eric Mumpower nocturne at permabit.com
Mon Dec 17 20:21:43 CET 2001


It appears that something has changed in Woody which affects the behavior of
openvt. When rcS_fai calls task_setup() from /usr/share/fai/subroutines,
openvt is invoked as "openvt -c2; openvt -c3". On a system booted from the
nfsroot I built this morning (from a Debian mirror updated late last week),
I get this error for each openvt invocation:

> Usage: openvt [-c vtnumber] [-l] [-u] [-s] [-v] [-w] -- command_line

Replacing the openvt invocation with this seems to work as expected:
"openvt -c2 bash; openvt -c3 bash"

However, this does not appear to be the real issue. Reading the openvt
manpage, I find that it defaults to using the command named by the
environment variable "SHELL". However, it appears that SHELL is set but
*not* exported when FAI is running:

> sh-2.05a# echo $SHELL
> /bin/bash
> sh-2.05a# export -p | grep -i shell
> sh-2.05a# export -p | head -3
> export AUTOBOOT="YES"
> export BOOTFILE="/boot/fai/test01"
> export BOOT_IMAGE="FAI-BOOTP"
> sh-2.05a# openvt -c6
> Usage: openvt [-c vtnumber] [-l] [-u] [-s] [-v] [-w] -- command_line
> sh-2.05a# export SHELL
> sh-2.05a# openvt -c6

[this final invocation of openvt succeeds]

I might imagine this is due to some change in /sbin/init, but I don't quite
have time to chase it all down on my own.

Can anyone verify that the FAI install-time shells have SHELL not only set,
but exported? ("export -p | grep -i shell") If so, what version of init is
being used by your nfsroot? My nfsroot is using version "2.84-1".



More information about the linux-fai mailing list