When the Linux server was revived, one of the things that I didn't get working was the UPS signaling. I kept getting a message that the getty was respawning too rapidly and I couldn't figure out how to fix it, so I just disabled the entry in /etc/inittab.
I decided to play with it a bit today, and I partially fixed it - at least it's back to functioning the way it used to, which wasn't quite right, but close enough. The not quite right part is that if I call powstatd as part of the boot process (i.e. from /etc/rc.d/rc3.d) as soon as I log in, the sytem shuts down as if the UPS were sending a low battery signal. However, if I run powstatd manually after logging in, it runs fine. My guess is that this is a bug in powstatd, but I don't have the interest to install the latest version right now, and it really doesn't matter, since once the system shuts down if the battery goes low, I have to manually power it back on, so I just restart the UPS daemon after I do so.
As to the specifics of the problem, the initial symptom was that the console would generate the following message:
INIT: Id "S0" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
This appeared to be a problem with how the serial port was configured, so I tried a whole bunch of different settings for S0 in /etc/inittab with no luck. I searched through /etc/gettydefs and tried calling different stanzas in /etc/inittab with no luck.
I thought maybe there was a problem with the physical port not reporting its UART correctly, so I tried running the setserial command with various parameters with no luck.
Somehow, it finally occurred to me to see if maybe the problem was that even though there is only one serial port on the back of the system, that it was configured as Com1 rather than Com0, and maybe I should change the line in /etc/inittab from:
S0:2345:respawn:/sbin/uugetty ttyS0 F38400
to
S1:2345:respawn:/sbin/uugetty ttyS1 F38400
That fixed the respawning message, but still didn't get the powstatd running correctly.
I did some more digging, and discovered that I also had to modify /etc/powstatd.conf from:
# Watch /dev/ttyS0
watch ttyS0
to
# Watch /dev/ttyS1
watch ttyS1
I still haven't fixed the locale error message when httpd starts, nor have I fixed Xwindows, but I am happy now that the UPS signaling is working again.
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Posted by David at August 05, 2007 03:52 AM