On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 8:07 PM, David Relson <relson@osagesoftware.com>wrote:

> On Sat, 6 Feb 2010 19:13:33 -0500
> Willie Wong wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Feb 06, 2010 at 06:29:27PM -0500, David Relson wrote:
> > > Your replies are much appreciated as we're in an area of Linux about
> > > which I'm poorly informed.
> > >
> > > Output (below) of "rc-status sysinit" indicated devfs stopped, so I
> > > started devfs (which didn't change /dev/pt*), then restarted udev
> > > (which didn't affect /dev/pt*).
> >
> > Right, but can you ssh in to the machine now (or open a terminal
> > emulator in X)?
> >
> > /dev/pts is just the mount point for the devpts pseudo filesystem. In
> > modern versions of linux the pts devices are created on-the-fly when
> > requested (as opposed to other versions and some modern unixes where
> > there will be a fixed number of device nodes under /dev/pts or
> > equivalent). All that just goes to say that if /dev/pts is empty
> > right after you restart the devfs service, it is normal. A device file
> > should be created automatically now when userspace programs demand it.
> > (E.g. if you now ssh in, and if it succeeds, ls /dev/pts should show
> > one entry.)
> >
> > Try it, let me know if the problem is still there.
>
> Nope.  Both ssh and X terminal emulators are still broken.  No change
> in behavior.
>
> FWIW, most of the entries in /dev are timestamped 02/02 23:34 which is
> when I updated udev earlier this week. Today's upgrade/downgrade emerge
> hasn't affected the timestamps.
>
> A comparison of /etc/udev/rules.d to a saved copy didn't show
> much.  The only puzzling difference is:
>  --- 90-hal.rules      (revision 51)
>   +++ 90-hal.rules     (working copy)
>   @@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
>    # pass all events to the HAL daemon
>   -RUN+="socket:/org/freedesktop/hal/udev_event"
>   +RUN+="socket:@/org/freedesktop/hal/udev_event"
>
> removing the "@" and restarting udev hasn't helped.  Since the rule is
> hal related, I also restarted hald -- which hasn't helped.
>
>
What happens if you do:

mount -t devpts none /dev/pts

Does the problem go away?

-James