Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!snorkelwacker!mit-eddie!thakur
From: thakur@eddie.mit.edu (Manavendra K. Thakur)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Xdm errors from init
Message-ID: <1990Feb28.194257.16567@eddie.mit.edu>
Date: 28 Feb 90 19:42:57 GMT
Reply-To: thakur@zerkalo.harvard.edu (Manavendra K. Thakur)
Organization: MIT
Lines: 62


I keep getting the following error message from init while running
xdm:

>Feb 28 10:18:12 zerkalo init: '/usr/bin/X11/xdm console' failing, sleeping

This appears in my console window over and over and over and over ...
and fills up my root disk space to boot.  Can anyone tell me what
might be causing this and how I can fix it?

I start xdm from /etc/ttytab on my Sun 3/160 (running 4.0.3) as
follows:

#
# @(#)ttytab 1.4 88/02/07 SMI
#
# name  getty                           type            status	comments
#
console "/usr/bin/X11/xdm"      xterms          on secure
ttya    "/usr/etc/getty std.9600"       unknown         off secure
 .
 .
 .

Is this the right way to start up xdm?  I couldn't find anything in
the xdm man page that explained precisely where or how to start up
xdm.  My configuration files in /usr/ilb/X11/xdm are very basic -- I
changed very little from the MIT distribution examples.

Another issue: Everytime I logout or the server dies, I get error
messages like these in my xdm-errors file:

XIO:  fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe) on X server ":0.0"
      after 428 requests (419 known processed) with 3 events remaining.
      The connection was probably broken by a server shutdown or KillClient.
XIO:  fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe) on X server ":0.0"
      after 1238 requests (1238 known processed) with 0 events remaining.
      The connection was probably broken by a server shutdown or KillClient.


One way I came up with to get rid of these errors is to have xdm
invoke the X server with its (the X server's) standard error
redirected to /dev/null.  So I have two questions:

1) Is it a really bad idea to redirect std err to /dev/null?  I know
that I would lose real error messages along with the annoying warnings.
Is there some better way to avoid the annoying messages in my
xdm-errors file?

2) If I wanted to, how could I start the X server with std err
redirected to /dev/null?  Would the following Xservers entry do what I
want?

	:0 local /usr/bin/X11/X :0 > /dev/null 2>&1


Any help with these questions would be greatly appreciated!  Please
respond to me via email, and I will summarize if there is interest.

					Manavendra Thakur
					thakur@eddie.mit.edu
					thakur@zerkalo.harvard.edu