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I run the website and several services of my small company on a VPS (running CentOS 6.8) on which I have full administrative rights.

Due to trying to pinpoint a memory leak issue in PHP scripts, I've been monitoring the VPS for some time and I have once again looked at the logs. What I see is a long string of log messages, such as these:

screenshot of the error messages

I would like to solve whatever configuration problems cause these errors to "pollute" the system logs, because they make the logs unusable. Every 5 seconds, I get a batch of these:

    Feb 17 12:43:03 vpsxxxxx init: tty (/dev/tty2) main process (1381) terminated with status 1
    Feb 17 12:43:03 vpsxxxxx init: tty (/dev/tty2) main process ended, respawning
    Feb 17 12:43:03 vpsxxxxx init: tty (/dev/tty1) main process (1382) terminated with status 1
    Feb 17 12:43:03 vpsxxxxx init: tty (/dev/tty1) main process ended, respawning
    Feb 17 12:43:03 vpsxxxxx /sbin/mingetty[1419]: tty2: no controlling tty: Operation not permitted
    Feb 17 12:43:03 vpsxxxxx /sbin/mingetty[1420]: tty1: no controlling tty: Operation not permitted

By the time the logs are rotated (on a weekly basis), I'm looking at over 60 MB in the log file, which brings nano to its knees.

I have no idea how necessary mingetty is to normal operation on the VPS (or to connecting via SSH). I'm the only one administering the server but I rarely use more than 2 simultaneous SSH connections.

Is there a solution to this amount of log messages related to mingetty?

2 Answers 2

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As your machine is a VM, you can disable totally mingetty and virtual consoles, as stated on http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO/getty-mingetty.html :

If the machine does not have a video card then remove all the mingetty entries from /etc/inittab.

As you are using CentOS 6, I suppose you have upstart and that there is no inittab. To disable tty you can create two files /etc/init.d/tty1.override and /etc/init.d/tty2.override only containing the word 'manual' (all commands are to be passed as root) :

echo manual > /etc/init/tty1.override
echo manual > /etc/init/tty2.override

But I recommend you to do some test before : stop tty1 and stop tty2, and try to open a new ssh connection. If it works, proceed with disabling tty1 and tty2.

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  • I have tried these instructions, to no avail. According to this thread on a forum, there was a bug in CentOS, and it's still amazingly there in 6.8. Anyway, I've reduced the number of ttys to 2 instead of 6, but I see the same problem of numerous logs when tailing /var/log/messages.
    – AbVog
    Feb 17, 2017 at 19:49
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@Hexdump led me to the solution through the reading that I had to do about upstart. Many thanks.

The solution for me came in two steps:

  • nano /etc/init/start-ttys.override (file contents further below)
  • shutdown -r now

The contents of the override file is:

env ACTIVE_CONSOLES=/dev/tty[1-1]
script

end script

Basically, I am replacing the problematic script that launches the mingetty instances with a no-op script.

The first line is a remnant of my trying to reduce the number of ttys, as per this thread, which also reveals that there is a bug in the way ACTIVE_CONSOLES is handled. This bug is the reason why a reboot was necessary. I am not sure this first line is necessary.

Problem solved, but I believe that the root cause is still to be solved, which leaves me with a sour aftertaste, so to speak: if I had had this log pollution issue on an actual machine, I would not have been able to disable the script. Therefore, I see it as a half-baked solution but for now, it's good enough for the current situation.

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