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

[Paul B. Henson]

> From: Paul Jochum
> Sent: Monday, November 11, 2013 2:34 PM
>
> neither seem to be helping.  I believe that the SuperMicro SOL is
> basically taking the true console port (not a tty port) and putting it
> on the LAN, and so changes to bootenv.rc and ttydefs do not affect it
> (but this is just my hypothesis right now, and would love to be proven
> wrong on it)

Well, sort of, but not exactly. When you have console redirection enabled in
the bios, it takes anything written to the standard VGA output and
duplicates it to the serial port -- but *only* for strings written with the
BIOS output functions. This covers POST, and typically boot loaders, but
once the OS starts up, it drives the vga console directly, rather than
through the BIOS, and the output only shows up on the VGA console. So, if
you want the OS to use a serial console you need to configure it in the OS.

I generally don't bother configuring grub explicitly for a serial console,
as the bios redirection typically works fine for it. You just need to be
sure to disable the splashscreen, as that switches the VGA console to
graphics mode rather than text mode which the bios can't replicate. Looks
like you already did that. As far as configuring the OS, I usually set the
boot variables with eeprom:

# eeprom console
console=ttyc
# eeprom ttyc-mode
ttyc-mode=115200,8,n,1,-

At least on my supermicro motherboard, there are two physical serial ports,
and then the virtual SOL port shows up as a third.

The last piece is to update the definition of the console in ttydefs:

console:115200 hupcl opost onlcr:115200::console

If you don't, as soon as the OS tries to start the login prompt on the
console, there's the baud rate mismatch and it dies :(.

Unless I'm misremembering/forgetting something, that's pretty much all I
needed to do to get it going on my box...