On Sun, 11 Jul 2010, Peter Bako wrote:

quoted text
> I'm setting up (well, trying to I guess :-) ) a read-only OpenBSD system to
> run off a small CF card.  Never having done this before, I found an
> excellent article written by Daniele Mazzocchio
> (http://www.kernel-panic.it/openbsd/embedded/) to use as my guide.  I had a
> few minor issues crop up, but have been able to work my way through them.
> However I finally got to one that I am stumped with.
> 
> Basically once I boot of my new image, I am able to log into it on the
> serial console and things look ok.  I can also ping the IP address of the
> unit, but when I try to SSH into it I get the following message: 
> 
>   "Server refused to allocate pty"
> 
> I've checked over my setup and all seems fine as per the instructions.  I
> have all the pty* devices from /dev (which is RO) linked to /var/run/dev
> (which is in memory), so the problem cannot be that these devices are not
> writeable.  (Actually /var is linked to /tmp/var, where the /tmp directory
> is in memory and populated by the image from a directory called /template.)
> 
> Unfortunately this goes a bit beyond my current skill set, so if anyone has
> any suggestions I really would appreciate the help.

Since you are have broken your system by running something very non standard
you get the pleasure of keeping both broken pieces :)

That being said, you should start your debugging with sshd. Follow the
trail from src/usr.bin/ssh/session.c:session_pty_req(). Running sshd in
debug mode (sshd -ddd), ktrace and adding a few debug("XXX") logs in there
can be enormously illuminating.

-d