Topic: serial port connections

[cozmos9]

Could someone point me in the right direction on how to use/configure the serial port in SME7?  My Dell bios allows me to redirect to ser1.  This way, I can view the server's boot process from a workstation.  Once the OS takes over, however, the redirect stops.  I assume I have to run a new serial port session, but various attempts have so far failed.

Why do I want to do a serial connection?  I was upgrading from 6.x to 7pre3 this weekend.  After the data restoration, eth0 configuration disappeared and therefore lost connectivity to the box (Dell poweredge sc1425 w/ gb eth).   It occurred to me that if I had a serial connection to the box, I would have poked around and tried to fix the interface problem.  That's my reason.

Thanks for any help,
Jean

[cozmos9]

Holy cow!  This is not for the feint of heart.  A search on RedHat yielded an extensive and fairly involved how-to on this.  If anyone knows a shortcut, it would sure be helpful.  Also, this might be a nice feature to have pre-configured in the distro.

[Reinhold]

cozmos9,

Have you tried this ?  
(Enabling Serial Port Console Redirection on Linux-based Dell Servers)
Personally I prefer a 15$ KVM switch ...but the above works!
Please let me know why you find a serial console of use and what you use it for ?!

Regards
Reinhold

[cozmos9]

Hey, thanks a bunch for the link.  I'll check that out.  I have a bunch of KVMs also, but they're no good for remote admin.  I know there are IP based KVMs, but those are upwards of $800.

I don't need this functionality per se.  When I was migrating from 6.01 to 7 over the weekend, I lost IP config/connectivity.  So, I had to wait till I had physical access to figure out what to do.  If I had serial access, I could have vnc'ed into my workstation, then access sme from there.  So...

Jean