Duplicate pseudo terminals in linux

Solution 1:

Have you tried with a more recent version of Red Hat? 4.3 is pretty old, the latest 4.x-release is 4.8. Also, Red Hat 5 is in version 5.4 which is a big step forward. If you like to try a newer version without the hassle of purchasing Red Hat you can try CentOS which is binary compatible with Red Hat.

Solution 2:

The advice to upgrade your server is sound.

Failing that, you can upgrade SOME of the applications and not others. Which components, and just how far to upgrade them, is "left as an exercise for the student".

First you'll want to do some tests to find out what terminal emulator program is being used by people when this happens. Is it Xterm? If so please see the "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 8 Release Notes" - http://mirror.centos.org/centos/3/docs/release-notes/as-amd64/RELEASE-NOTES-U8-x86_64-en.html

There you'll find a bug fix for xterm which states simply: "don't write double utmp entry"

So this would lead me to surmise you should probably upgrade xterm to at least xterm-179-6.EL3 (dont ask me why the version number says EL3; I have no idea)

Hope this helps!
-pbr