Note: This bug is displayed in read-only format because the product is no longer active in Red Hat Bugzilla.

RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.

Description of problem: 

After GUI login, attempts to launch gnome-terminal generate the following error:

"There was an error creating the child process for this terminal.

grantpt failed: Operation not permitted." 

Konsole and xterm launch normally.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 3.14.3


How reproducible: 100% on all systems tested so far (5+).


Steps to Reproduce:
1. Log in to GUI session.
2. Launch "Terminal" either by right-click or from menu.
3.

Actual results:

Terminal launches with above error and no shell prompt.

Expected results:

Terminal launches without error.

Additional info: mount entry for devpts:

devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,seclabel,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)

Is /dev/pts properly mounted?

Could you please strace /usr/libexec/gnome-terminal-server and all its child processes? eg., the following command will create a file called 'slog' with the strace logs:
$ strace -f -oslog /usr/libexec/gnome-terminal-server

RHEL 7 is approaching its Extended Life Cycle Support phase. Given the non-critical nature of this bug, it's not fit for RHEL 7 anymore. Let's try to fix this for RHEL 8.

Closing due to lack of sufficient data to act upon this report.

(In reply to Debarshi Ray from comment #2)
> Is /dev/pts properly mounted?

Was, yes (very very belatedly).

I believe that the issue ultimately came down to a UID mismatch between what the package expected starting with this version, and what /etc/passwd thought.  I no longer recall which user was involved though.

(In reply to Debarshi Ray from comment #3)
> Could you please strace /usr/libexec/gnome-terminal-server and all its child
> processes? eg., the following command will create a file called 'slog' with
> the strace logs:
> $ strace -f -oslog /usr/libexec/gnome-terminal-server

See above note.  Sadly, I no longer have access to the problematic system or the ability to reproduce.