Path: utzoo!attcan!darkover!seachg!jalsop
From: jalsop@seachg.UUCP (John Alsop)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ncr
Subject: Re: ttyb weirdness
Message-ID: <184@seachg.UUCP>
Date: 2 Feb 90 19:48:25 GMT
Organization: Sea Change Corporation, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
Lines: 23

rg@psgdc (Dick Gill) writes:

>After hitting a <RETURN>, the cursor moved down
>a line and to the left, but did not ask for a password.  Another
><RETURN> got me the password prompt and I entered the password,
>again followed by a <RETURN>.  Once again the cursor moved to
>the left and down a line but the system did not respond.  After
>another <RETURN> the system responded that the login was
>invalid and asked for a login again.  Several additional tries
>gave me the same result.

This sounds like an interactive shell or other program is running in 
the background on that terminal. I've seen this happen on our system 
and it can be a real pain. Basically the background program and the 
login process take turns reading from the tty, but you never know for 
sure which one will get which line of input. 

Try logging in on another terminal and checking what processes are 
running on the affected port. 

If this problem persists across a shutdown and reboot, perhaps there 
is a commonly used program or shell script that is inadvertently 
starting a background process reading from the terminal.