Dear Maintainer,

On one of my machines, a VPS, screen immediately terminates after startup:

- I log in using ssh.
- I type 'screen' and press enter at the shell prompt.
- The screen is blanked, the message [screen is terminating] is printed, and
  the shell prompt appears.

Running screen under gdb shows that screen receives a SIGHUP, but I have not
yet managed to get a useful backtrace, since debug symbols are missing.

Perhaps also relevant is the fact that both tmux and mosh also do not work
properly on this machine.

Regards,
Matijs van Zuijlen

Hi Matijs,

Matijs van Zuijlen wrote:

Do you happen to know if the screen client or the screen server (or
both) receive the SIGHUP?

Noted. I'll see that I'll add a binary package with debug symbols to
the source package.

Maybe not relevant, but at least helpful in tracking down the source.
A few questions are raised by this:

* Which kind of VPS is this? I suspect something more lightwieght like
  VServer, OpenVZ, Virtuozzo or maybe LXC.

* What are the permissions of /dev/tty? ("ls -l /dev/tty")
* What groups does the user you're trying to do that belong to?

Did you compile the package yourself on that machine or did you use
the binary package from Wheezy? (Not sure if that makes a difference,
but in case, I know what I need to check in case the fact that it runs
on Ubuntu or Natty is relevant.)

		Regards, Axel

Hi Axel,

<aside>
I did some more experimenting. After some back and forth, I purged the
reinstalled screen.

Now, when running screen under gdb, I get this result:

  (gdb) run
  Starting program: /usr/bin/screen
  Directory '/var/run/screen' must have mode 777.
  [Inferior 1 (process 19056) exited with code 01]

These are the relevant permissions:

  [matijs@mist] ls -ld /var/run/screen
  drwxrwxr-x 2 root utmp 40 Jul  7 08:21 /var/run/screen
  [matijs@mist] ls -l /usr/bin/screen
  -rwxr-sr-x 1 root utmp 410688 Sep 16  2012 /usr/bin/screen

From bug #471763, I understand these permissions should be fine.
</aside>

Anyway, if I then set the mode of /var/run/screen to 777 and run screen again, I
get this:

  [screen is terminating]

  Program received signal SIGHUP, Hangup.
  0xf57fe424 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
  (gdb)

I would think this means it's the client program that receives the SIGHUP.

Not entirely sure. It is hosted by RimuHosting, and their information is not
that detailed: http://rimuhosting.com/vps/aboutvps.jsp

  [matijs@mist] ls -l /dev/tty
  crw-rw-rw- 1 root tty 5, 0 Jul  7 08:40 /dev/tty

  [matijs@mist] groups
  matijs adm www-data

The system started out with Ubuntu 8.04, but was upgraded and finally switched
to Debian Wheezy. The information above comes from an obsolete /etc/lsb-release
file. I'm using the binary packages from Wheezy.

Regards,

Hi,

I'm having similar issue on Debian Wheezy. It seems that screen is not
reporting problems as it should in previous versions. For example, during
my test for a chroot jailed environment, screen terminates immediately.

On Debian Squeeze, I noticed it was because 'No more PTY's. Sorry could not
find a PTY' error was shown, but version  4.1.0~20120320gitdb59704-7 does
not show the error message.

The PTY issue is offtopic, but screen should report the error which it
didn't in this version.

Regards,
Choong

Hi Alex and all,

I was hit by similar symptoms while running wheezy in a lxc container
from a sid host.
I think it was previously working but I don't really know what changed
(I do not reboot that often)
Anyway, I build screen with debug and the log shows 'No more PTY' but
this is never displayed (as Jun Jin Choong said).

Changing the permission of /dev/ptmx to 666 fixed it for me.

So I thought it might interest others.

Best Regards,

Julien VdG

Hi all,

This bug report is very old, with no activity in 13 years.

To those affected - please re-test with latest unstable / 5.0.1-1.

I will leave this bug open for a few weeks, then close as unreproducible
if I receive no feedback.

Cheers,
Peter