Mgetty lock up: problem with execv() ?

[Duncan Mercer]

Hi

I'm having a problem using mgetty and RH9.0
Mgetty locks up during the login process.

Having looked around the archive  I have found one
similar problem but no fix was ever posted.

I have three machines running identical (uptodate)
copies of RH9.0 and mgetty 1.1.30

The old machine (600Mhz) runs fine no problems.
Both new machines (1.7GHz & 2.0GHz) have mgetty
lock up at the point it spawns the login process.

The symptoms are as follows when dialing into a "broken"
machine

1. dial in via the modem on the serial port
2. Mgetty answers and establishes the connection
3. Mgetty presents the inital login prompt
4. mgetty reads the user name that is entered
5. mgetty attempts to spawn the login process as 
which matches the user name.

6. The login process is started but never runs

If I complie mgetty with debug info and trace through
it using a debugger, mgetty runs fine and calls "execv()" to 
launch the new process. The new process appears to get 
started (it appears in the ps -aux listing) but never runs.

I have so far failed to manage to trace the system calls
through execv properly so I have not yet managed to
isolate the failure point.

If I run strace against mgetty in a further attempt to 
isolate the problem then mgetty will run fine every
time, without strace then mgetty is broken every time.

As far as I can see the problem relates to the execv()
call and I'm wondering if there is some race condition
going on as both my fast machines fail and the slow
one works fine. 

Any suggestions?

Duncan (scratching my head) Mercer