Question

On Centos 6.2, trying to get the kernel log redirected to the serial console, I came across an issue where agetty seems to be respawning every few keypresses.

That is, I get a login prompt in the middle of typing (after logging in).

In order to investigate the issue further, I’m looking for the location of agetty logs, but to no avail. Where and how can I see log messages for respawned agetty process?

Answer 1

The “diagnostics” section of the “agetty” command manpage states:

Depending on how the program was configured, all diagnostics are written to
the console device or reported via the syslog(3) facility. Error messages are 
produced if the port argument does not specify a terminal device; if there is 
no utmp entry for the current process (System V only); and so on.

The syslog facility by default writes the “/var/log/messages” file, but it can be configured to write another file by editing its configuration file “/etc/syslog.conf”.

Finally, if the error you get is “respawning too fast”, you should check your “/etc/inittab” file, as described here.