Well this is one of those problems that makes a person wonder about why their
system acts up, attention maybe?, and then after posting a help request clears
up.
About an hour or two after posting I noticed a login prompt on the con. It seems
to have cleared itself. Or maybe some process had a lock on the console output?
Any way, I don't know how it happened but it fixed itself.
There about 3 people who would know about ^S, ^Q or even ^D. Anyone who uses
the con runs Openwin without the benefit of screenlock. We do not use
screenblank either.
Thanks to the following for what they had to say. Maybe some one else will
be able to benefit from some of these replies.
________________________________________________________________________________
> From: Syed Zaeem Hosain <Zaeem.Hosain@esstech.com>
>
> A random though: have you tried typing control-Q at the keyboard?
________________________________________________________________________________
> From: jakem@apex.com (Jake Mahon)
>
> I have a number of sun4s and sun4cs without bitmapped displays.
> Each pair is hooked to a serial terminal. Often the back/inactive
> console goes lifeless.
>
> I can usually remote log into the lifeless console and bring it back
> to life. As root:
>
> stty sane > /dev/console ^j (that last is a <ctrl> <j>)
>
> if hitting a key on the hung console doesn't free it, i interrupt
> the "stty sane", then:
>
> kill the console getty process
> kill -1 1 to restart the console getty process
> repeat the stty sane.
> From irana@hrwallingford.co.uk Fri Oct 6 06:12:14 1995
> lockscreen out of control - can you log on to the
> machine remotely? and kill lockscreen? that is if you run
> lockscreen.
>
> IPCs for instance have two framebuffers and it could be plugged
> into the wrong framebuffer.
>
> The monitor may have blown, the framebuffer may have blown.
> Is there power to the monitor ?
>
> The eeprom settings may have been corrupted and need to be set
> to the default, however if it is this scenario then you need
> to eventually reboot:
>
> L1 N together
> switch off and then back on
> hold down L1 N for at least 60 seconds. (I think)
> From: mike_titus <mike@newton.haystack.edu>
> I have occasionally seen it happen that when logging out
> of a session at the console, a user hits a <ctrl> S, when
> they meant to hit <ctrl> D (easy to do since S is right next
> to D on the keyboard). Of course, <ctrl> S will freeze the
> terminal session and thus no more keyboard entry will be
> accepted. If this is what has happened, you should be able
> to hit a <ctrl> Q and get the terminal session back.
________________________________________________________________________________
> From: Herbert Wengatz <hwe@uebemc.siemens.de>
Who asked for more info. Thanks for being willing to assist further.
________________________________________________________________________________
> From poehlem@img.wdc.com Fri Oct 6 12:13:29 1995
>
> Outside of the obvious, kill the screenblank process, or the monitor/terminal has died, I have no ideas.
________________________________________________________________________________
> From: Ian MacPhedran <Ian_MacPhedran@dvinci.usask.ca>
>
> The most common causes for this description from our users are:
> 1) exitting OpenWindows and having same colour foreground and background
> - try clear_colormap
> 2) someone pressed control-s on the keyboard - try pressing control-q
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:10:34 CDT