Server refused to allocate pty (FIX)

[Matt Johnston]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2004 at 01:12:19AM -0400, Ethan wrote:
> I ran into this issue, so here are my notes to save others time.
> 
> Rolling a custom embedded setup on a CF card (6mb so far with libusb +
> gphoto2!).
> 
> SSH'ing in generates "Server refused to allocate pty"
> 
> Problem was lack of mountpoint defined in fstab.... Kernel had pty support
> (it worked), but mising mountpoint caused error:
> 
> For FSTAB:
>     none            /dev/pts        devpts        gid=5,mode=620    0 0
> 
> /dev/ptmx, pts files and pts directory required (already existed in my
> case).
> 
> Now my issue is passwords are being ignored... build tinylogin to ignore
> the glibc name resolution stuff, but login allows root in with no
> password. Same with busybox, so it's something system wide. Hash exists in
> /etc/shadow.

So you want Dropbear to allow logins with the password which has its hash
in /etc/shadow? Dropbear doesn't use login, so whatever tinylogin is doing
is probably different. Although underneath, they might be calling the same
libc functions (getpwnam() etc). The first thing to check is probably that
Dropbear has shadow support compiled in, look for SHADOW in config.h
What error message appears in the Dropbear logs (or on standard error if
you run it with -E)?

Cheers,
Matt