*BSD News Article 8203


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.hawaii.edu!ames!think.com!enterpoop.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!linus!alliant!dufault
From: dufault@alliant.com (Peter Dufault)
Subject: Re: HELP: Gateway 2000 Anykey Keyboard dies (HACK FIX with more info)
Message-ID: <1992Nov27.193302.10874@alliant.com>
Organization: Alliant Computer Systems Corp.
References: <Qf5GGWm00WB30QSEtE@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1992 19:33:02 GMT
Lines: 42

Status: RO

I explored this problem a little more in response to this post,
and characterized it better and worked out a hack.

The symptom is that the keyboard is hanging after the
system comes up.

Suggested fixes have been that you hit carriage returns while the
system comes up or you log in over a network or serial port and
su.

The keyboard hangs until either

1. There is pending keyboard input and something is sent to the
console or

2. Something is sent to the console after getty has opened it for
reading.

This is 100% reproducible on my system, a Micronics 486VL motherboard.
I wonder if some of the people who say this happens intermittently
would check and see if it doesn't happen all the time if they keep
their hands off the keyboard during system boot.

The following hack lets me always log in.  I changed the end of
/etc/rc from this:

> echo -n "^[[0x"
> exit 0

To this:

> echo -n "^[[0x"
> (sleep 5; echo "Kick" > /dev/console) &
> exit 0

and can now log in after the "Kick" shows up at the console.

Anybody got any clues as to why this would fix this?

Peter Dufault