Not so long ago, I logged into System Controller of SunFire T2000 running Solaris 10 and tried to access server’s console. For some reason, usual console command did not work. It simply did not return anything.

figured maybe something was stuck, so I reset System Controller and tried again. Again, I got nothing, which was strange, because usually couple of ‘Enters’ bring up console login prompt.

This had worked before so I knew there was not some configuration issue elsewhere. I vaguely remembered that I had a similar issue in Solaris 9. If you look at /etc/inittab on Solaris 9 and prior you will see something like this:

co:234:respawn:/usr/lib/saf/ttymon -g -h -p "`uname -n` console login: " -T sun -d /dev/console -l console -m ldterm,ttcompat

Killing ttymon process would cause init respawn it again in specified run-levels. This fixed my problem then. On Solaris 10 it’s different. Console login prompt is handled by SMF:

bash-3.00# svcs -a | grep console-login
online         14:41:04 svc:/system/console-login:default

So, restarting svc:/system/console-login:default should fix the issue:

bash-3.00# svcadm restart svc:/system/console-login:default

Now you should be able to get console login prompt from ALOM.