My hosting provider, Razor Servers, recently moved hosted centers from the 401 North Broad St location in Philadelphia to a building right next door. As part of my VM move to the new location, I was no longer able to SSH into the device. I got this strange error about PTY allocation request failed. In addition, the SPAMD process was not running on the box. I tried to re-install SpamAssassin, I tried to re-install Exim and I even tried a complete upgrade of cPanel. No go. I thought the two might be related so a Googling I went…
After a good long while of Googling the problem, I found this site with my exact error message. Via the web console, I checked to see if /dev/ptmx existed, it didn’t. I ran the command as noted on the page:
sbin/MAKEDEV -d /dev ptmx
Restarted the ssh daemon:
service sshd restart
And, presto, I was able to SSH back into my box. No idea why that file would disappear after a VM move, but it is all fixed now.