[OmniOS-discuss] OmniOS / SuperMicro motherboard and settings for IPMI SOL

[Marion Hakanson]

jimklimov at cos.ru said:
> On a side note, I'd love to find a way to report to the "screen" console that
> the system is booted and login should be sought on the serial port. Because
> KVMing or otherwise looking at a blank screen makes the hand jerk
> involuntarily towards the reset button ;) But things like /dev/console are
> only routed to the current console (serial). I believe, virtual terminals
> (vt{1-6}) do have a way to hook up the physical console, I just did not find
> it back then :-\ Likewise, in this aspect I miss Linux approach to /dev/
> console (or some similar device?) being a sort of multiplexor that has one
> input but spews over many outputs like serial, screen and UDP-sink at once...

I treat this as a hardware problem, which needs a hardware solution.  In
this case, I print up labels that say, "Serial Console Only" and attach
them to the front and rear of the server.  If you really need the VGA
display to be active after boot, you can always enable an X11 desktop
session, but it won't connect directly to the OS /dev/console.

To elaborate, I've not found a reliable way to have GRUB activate both the
serial console and the VGA console at the same time, on all the variety of
hardware we have here.  So, I think it is wise to believe this comment
in the OmniOS "menu.lst" file:

# WARNING: do not enable grub serial console when BIOS console serial
#       redirection is active.

It's a little misleading, but I've found that on some hardware this means
you must leave the "terminal ..." directive commented out, but you do still
need the "serial ..." directive.

BTW, I have found Solaris-10, OpenIndiana-151a7, and OmniOS all behave
slightly differently with regard to setting up serial console (at the
OS level).  For example, Solaris-10 cannot have multiple "-B blah" args
on the kernel line in menu.lst, while the Illumos-based systems can do so.
That's the main difference.  All of them benefit from "-B" args, such
as "console=ttyb" (or ttya), and 'ttyb-mode="115200,8,n,1,-", and all
of them need /etc/ttydefs tweaked to match the baud rate of the BIOS
serial redirection settings.  Some pay attention to "eeprom" settings
and don't need the menu.lst "-B" settings, but it doesn't hurt to set
both on all such systems.

Regards,

Marion