Topic: Replace VGA with serial port as console

[William Wong]

As captioned, may I know which file to modify and what to modify such that all text output during boot up and subsequent operations can be redirected to a serial port on the motherboard.

I will still plug the VGA card in but just don't want to attach a VGA monitor to the e-smith server.

Thank you for reading through.


Rgds,


William

[Ernesto Lorenz]

Hi William,
Supposing you will use ttyS0 (a.k.a COM1) port @ 9600 bps, 8 bits, no parity, 1 stop, to hook up the serial console, you may follow  these directons:

Place the following lines in /etc/lilo.conf
   serial=0,96008n
   append="console=tty0 console=ttyS0,9600n8"

execute lilo
> lilo

Change to the custom templates directory
>cd /etc/ e-smith/templates-custom/etc/inittab

create a file named 85serialconsole
>pico 85serialconsole
with the following content
   ------------------------------------------------
   # Serial console terminal
   4:123457:respawn:/sbin/agetty -h -L 9600 /dev/ttyS0 vt100
   #------------------------------------------------

expand this template
>/sbin/e-smith/expand-template /etc/inittab

load the new inittab
>telinit q

Hook up your serial console and reboot!

I haven't been able to login as root through the serial console, but admin works fine and so does a user created by me called rpmmaker.

How knows why the root account is not working through the serial console?

Good luck and enjoy.

[Ernesto Lorenz]

Here is a link to a very nice how-to doc about serial console on SME server written by Mr Lafferty (thanks to Mr. Lafferty)::
http://www.lafferty.ca/software/sme/serial-console/

Enjoy