Console wierdness under 3.5

[Chris Johnston]

In article <8812282227.AA02666 at zaphod.uchicago.edu> you write:
>...On most of our clients,
>logging in via the console is impossible because whatever user name
>(including root) you give, after hitting the carriage return no password
>is asked for, but instead a new login prompt is generated....

A guess...  Passwords are read from /dev/tty.  Check to see if it is a
really a device.  Should look like this.

chris at gargoyle 1 ls -lg /dev/null /dev/tty
crwxrwxrwx  1 root     wheel      3,   2 Jan 10 22:15 /dev/null
crw-rw-rw-  1 root     wheel      2,   0 Jan 10 22:16 /dev/tty
chris at gargoyle 2 file /dev/null /dev/tty
/dev/null:	character special (3/2)
/dev/tty:	character special (2/0)

cj