Re: Minor inittab/serial console question...

[Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>]

Seth R Arnold <sarnold@willamette.edu> writes:

> Rob, why not do everything via telnet or ssh? two network cards can be had
> for under $50 if the machines don't already have network cards..

The serial console is to handle cases where the machine can't even
boot to the telnet or ssh stage.  This machine is critical, so even if
it goes down when I'm away, I want to be able to dial up another
machine on it's local net and reach it's console via the serial port.
Then I can fix whatever's wrong (even lilo problems) and reboot it
(via X10 power cycling).

It's also just nice to be able to watch the machine's boot messages
now and then without having to put a video card in there to make sure
everything's OK.

> (sorry for the lack of real response, I don't know how to do what you
> want... so I will try to find out why you want it. :)

Well, now that I think about it, I'm not sure I want what I thought I
wanted.  I wasn't thinking too clearly last night (too much time spent
setting up a mess of stuff).  What I'd really like is some little
daemon on the machine connected to the headless machine that watches
and logs the serial port output, and that you could connect to
whenever you wanted (access would be exclusive) to communicate with
the other machines console and to page back through the log.  That
daemon would "own" the port.  Sort of a virtual virtual terminal...

For now I get 90% of what I want just using minicom, so I'll probably
just stick with that...

Thanks

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930