init respawning too fast

[moztech]

CentOS 5.9 VM running as a web server recently rebooted to allow installation of the 'ghost' security patch and ever since reboot I'm seeing messages like the below every few minutes

Code: Select all

init: Id "2" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

Looking at /etc/inittab the offending line is presumably:
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1

I can see a running /sbin/mingetty process in ps aux with a recently started time.

/etc/inittab appears to be identical to other CentOS 5.9 boxes which are running happily. Being a server it runs in runlevel 3 and it appears to be otherwise functioning correctly.

The only thing I can think of is that the machine runs a remote kernel loaded from the Xen based host server as opposed to the original CentOS kernel but this shouldn't have changed and is not a new kernel (uname shows it as 2.6.32.62-kvm-i386-20140610)

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

[TrevorH]

The CentOS supplied kernel works perfectly under xen.

Please note that 5.9 is more than one year old and no security updates have been released for it since 5.10 was released. If you are really running 5.9 then you should run yum update ASAP to bring your machine to 5.11.

[moztech]

Sorry, I've no idea where 5.9 came from, it should have said 5.11