Re: [vox-tech] Good distro for beginner?

[Chuck Polisher <cpolish@ns.nMAPSet>]

> I know this is vague, but a colleague of mine is vexed regarding 
> a "init command is respawning too rapidly" error. Any ideas? 
> If not, that's fine. I've seen this before also, but never found 
> out what would cause this type of error. The question seems to be 
> "too rapidly" for what? UA

UA,

init, the mother of all processes, using /etc/inittab as a 
rulebook, spawns a certain number of getty's (or, agetty's, 
or, mingetty's...) which attach themselves to tty's and wait 
for someone to log in. Then someone does log in, and does 
stuff, and then logs out. That's when the getty process dies, 
and init re-spawns another getty process to take its place. 
So, ideally, we've got a fixed pool of getty's, all occasionally 
getting renewed. That's what a _healthy_ system does. init has 
some logic that prevents massive churning in the case that getty 
dies from unatural causes. From the BOOTDISK-HOWTO:

  If init starts, but you get a message like:
        Id xxx respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

   it is coming from init, usually indicating that getty or login is
   dying as soon as it starts up. Check the getty and login executables
   and the libraries they depend upon. Make sure the invocations in
   /etc/inittab are correct. If you get strange messages from getty, it
   may mean the calling form in /etc/inittab is wrong.

HTH, HAND,
Chuck Polisher 
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