Score:0

Ubuntu 20.04 text console unresponsive in VMWare until killed

tn flag
awm

I'm having an odd issue with my Ubuntu virtual machines. Using VMWare ESXi 7, vSphere 7.0.3 when the VMs startup, the console (text) is unresponsive, you see the initial motd and login prompt, possibly followed up with some application startup messages but then if you launch either an RC or web console, keyboard doesn't seem to register any keys.

If I ssh into the instance, and kill the agetty process on tty1 (which spawns a new process) the console starts responding again.

# ps -eaf | grep tty
root         890       1  0 05:53 tty1     00:00:00 /sbin/agetty -o -p -- \u --noclear tty1 linux
# kill 890
root        4227       1  0 06:38 tty1     00:00:00 /sbin/agetty -o -p -- \u --noclear tty1 linux    

console now responds in RC and web.

Allen Bailey avatar
cn flag
I've no answer as of yet but am now experiencing the same behaviour Ubuntu 20.04 guest on an ESXi 6.5 server. As you've noted killing the tty process for the local console causes it to restart a working tty. . very odd.
Score:0
ga flag

Same problem here, verified on

  • Ubuntu 20.04.5
  • vCenter 7.0.3.01100

Once the web console was used, the tty is unresponsive from both web console and VMRC. There seems to be a user dependency. A colleague of mine used a web console on the same VM, the characters I entered appeared and the tty was up and running again. OS initiated reboots fail when the tty is broken (ssh and vCenter)

Restarting the tty service fixed the issue in the web console as well for me - until the next reboot.

systemctl restart [email protected]

I'm still researching on the issue.

EDIT:

https://communities.vmware.com/t5/ESXi-Discussions/Sudden-VM-console-keyboard-input-failure-of-the-6-7-0-Update-3/td-p/525794

On my keyboard "Scroll Lock" was activated. Deactivating it immediately resolved the issue.

mangohost

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