could not grant slave pty

Cause

User gets the error message could not grant slave pty when attempting a telnet(1), rlogin(1), or rsh(1) session (anything that requires a shell) or when trying to bring up an x-term.

Action

The user's file permissions were set wrong on /usr/lib/pt_chmod. The user had:

# ls -la /usr/lib/pt_chmod
---s--x--x   1 bin     bin         3120 May  3  1996

# ls -la /usr/lib/pt_chmod
---s--x--x   1 root     bin         3120 May  3  1996

The owner should be root; the user had bin as the owner. Also, the setuid bit must be set.

By using chown root pt_chmod, the problem was corrected.