Some program is causing a pty leak which leaves the system in a state that will no longer allow programs like expect, screen or normal logins via ssh or telnet to function. I think the problem lies either in "expect" "autoexpect" or one of it components. For the last week or so I have been experementing with these tools, and eventually got this error while running an expect script. The system has no more ptys. Ask your system administrator to create more While executing ftp "spawn ftp" (file /home/user/bin/ftp-sync.exp" line x) I tried cycling init states to 1 and back to 3 to see if that could help resolve the problem. That did not work. I asked about this in #linux on efnet, and one other user mentioned that he gets this error with screen quite often. Regards - Supaplex
Do you have more than 256 login sessions running?
What does /dev/pts look like - does it have 256 allocated ptys?
I have never used more then 20 ptys on this system. My latest kernel was compiled for support of 64 ptys in relation to that fact. The directory below /dev/pts is empty.
What does an strace of an affected program look like?
closed due to lack of feedback.