Console Redirection After Boot

[Jerry Yu]

>
> I believe Brian's question is on 'bios redirect after boot' as in 'os
> boot'. Dell PE series have BIOS redirect builtin and you can enable it from
> BIOS to select serial port (ttyS0 or ttyS1), baud rate (115200 or 57600 or
> 9600), and whether to have 'bios redirect after boot'. I always have to turn
> off 'bios redirect after boot', since it interferes with the agetty/mgetty
> listening on the same serial port (CentOS 4 or RHAS 4).
>
> On 11/1/06, Gordon Henderson <gordon at drogon.net> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 31 Oct 2006, Brian A. Seklecki wrote:
> >
> > > All:
> > >
> > > What's the deal with this feature?  Was it intended to be used for any
> > > relatively modern OS?
> > >
> > > It seems to work with DOS and Memtest86+, and perhaps then even some
> > of
> > > the bootable FreeDOS based utils available from Dell.
> > >
> > > But forget about using it for anything that "does not use the BIOS for
> > > console I/O."
> > >
> > > All the Dell Linux docs I find suggest not using it; use the DRAC
> > > VGA->VNC feature instead,  but Dell really bungled that with the new
> > > DRAC5 and the ActiveX dependency (imagine that, an embedded Linux
> > device
> > > that serves an ActiveX applet -- the irony is painful)
> >
> > I can't answer your question about using BIOS for console IO, so this
> > may
> > not help, but I do use "console over serial" in many (remote) Linux
> > installations I have (None Dell, but I see no reason why it won't work
> > in
> > a Dell). You can make lilo use the serial line (and I'm sure grub too),
> > and it's a compile & command-line feature for the linux kernel (but I'd
> > be
> > surprised it if wasn't included in the standard Dell/RH kernels, and you
> >
> > just needed to activate it somehow - eg. in the grub config file)
> >
> > In lilo.conf it's as simple as putting:
> >
> >   serial=0,57600n8
> >
> > in it somewhere, and to make linux use it, you need something like:
> >
> >   append="console=ttyS0,57600n8"
> >
> > in the same file. I'm sure grub does it in a similar fashion, but I
> > don't
> > use grub so can't comment there. I do it this way on another vendors
> > mobos
> > which have a BIOS over serial switch, so if required I can connect to a
> > servers serial line (cisco terminal concentrator thingy) power cycle it,
> > and from then on, do bios "stuff", then boot lilo and do lilo poking,
> > then
> > into linux (with extra command-line "stuff", if required, and it all
> > "just
> > works".
> >
> > There is also a comple-time version of memtest to make it work over a
> > serial-line too (rather than rely on the console redirection, I guess)
> > I've used this too (but also have the non-serial line version of
> > memtest86+ installed too!)
> >
> > Gordon
> >
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>
>
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