messages appearing when not desired

Question

I have SSH access to a CentOS box and I have a strange behavior of that box, I have never seen before.

Lets say I am editing a file with vi or displaying tail -f of a file. Every time the server has some message to show, this message appears from the top, erasing the lines I was seeing from the file I was editing or tailing.

It is like console and terminal were combined over the same window. For example: if I am editing a file with vi and I check my emails using a client, I see a dump of lines showing that I am connecting to the box and these lines cover the lines I was seeing before.

How do I stop this? thanks

Answer 1

The system logger, or something, is sending output to /dev/console (or the pty your ssh session is in, since I don't think /dev/console actually includes that).

Fortunately, you can refresh the display; this will replace those messages with what was supposed to be there. vi and a lot of other terminal apps will respond to ctrl-l (try it). This also works at a command prompt, but it is the equivalent of clear.

You might want to send the admin a note about this since it's really only appropriate for significant messages (eg, "The system is going down for halt now!").