HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Configuration Management

11. Other things to check.
• Make sure your inittab entries are active
If you are just adding this terminal and have made a new entry in the /etc/
inittab file by editing it, remember that this doesn’t automatically make
your new entry active. To do that you need to enter the command:
# init -q
This tells the init process to scan the /etc/inittab file to update the
information in its internal tables.
• Check for functioning hardware.
Now is the time to check the hardware. To do this, check the following items:
— If your terminal has a self-test feature, activate it. If not, power the terminal
off, wait several seconds, and power the terminal back on. This will test
(at least to some degree) your terminal hardware.
NOTE: Power cycling a terminal can have the same effect as sending a
BREAK, which can make the host think it got a BREAK and change the
baud rate. If this happens a lot, use a gettydefs entry that does not cycle
through baud rates.
— An alternate method to test the terminal hardware is to swap the suspect
terminal with a known good one. This will help identify problems within
the terminal that are not caught by the terminal selftest.
NOTE: Be sure to swap only the terminal (along with its keyboard). You
want the known good terminal at the end of the SAME cable that the
suspect terminal was plugged into). Also, plug the suspect terminal (with
its keyboard) into the same cable that the known good terminal was
plugged into and see if it functions there.
— If the known good terminal doesn’t function on the suspect terminal’s
cable, and the suspect terminal is working fine in its new location, you can
be confident that the terminal itself is functioning properly and the problem
is elsewhere.
— The next thing to check is the cable connecting the terminal to the computer.
Swap the suspect cable with a known good one.
NOTE: Since you know the terminal at the end of each cable is working,
you only have to swap the ends of the cables where they connect to the
computer. If the problem remains with the terminal it was associated with
prior to the cable swap, you probably have a broken or miswired cable. If
the problem transfers to the other terminal (and the previously bad
150 Configuring Peripherals