Edit: Still good to remember how to disconnect. And still worth asking, how many little annoyances do you just choose to live with?
Originally posted January 20, 2015 on AIXchange
Recently a friend asked me about vtmenu:
“You know when you run vtmenu and you exit using ~. and it disconnects your ssh session to the HMC. Do you remember the keystroke combination which will just return me to the vtmenu or HMC command line? Can’t find it anywhere.”
This has happened to me before, I enter ~. and instead of going back one level it completely disconnects me from my ssh session to the HMC. Usually I’m absorbed with some task or problem — in the zone, you could say — and I just return to the HMC console, run vtmenu again, and reconnect to my partition without giving it a thought. I consider it another of life’s minor annoyances, like remembering to run set –o vi or stty erase ^? if your profile hasn’t been set up.
Of course to new users, those annoyances can really add up. But surely there is a solution.
Another friend offered this suggestion:
“Use ~~.~. is also the openssh exit. It doesn’t affect putty and the Windows ssh clients, but if you’re on linux… you quit ssh.”
I found similar advice here. And when I searched the AIXchange archives, I rediscovered this post.
“You can also use the mkvterm –m -p command if you know the machine name and the LPAR name. I find vtmenu to be useful if you do not know that information off the top of your head. If you need to get the machine name, try lssyscfg –r sys, then use lssyscfg -r lpar -m –F to get a list of LPAR names. If someone else is using a console, or you left a console running somewhere else, you can use the rmvterm –m -p command.Â
In any event, when you are done using a console, you can type ~~. in order to cleanly exit, and you will get a message that says Terminate session? [y/n]. Answer with y and you will go back to the vtmenu screen or to the command line, depending on what method you used to create the console.”
Pleased as I was to find this solution, it didn’t work for my friend. And because I couldn’t reproduce the problem, I was unable to offer further help. So the question remains: How do you cleanly disconnect from inside vtmenu? Hopefully my readers have some suggestions.
And in general, how accepting are you of these types of annoyances? Do you shrug them off, or do you put some effort into solving these problems? What about those of you who work on others’ machines where fooling around with .profiles and the like might not be appreciated?