Date: Sun, 05 Oct 2008 01:26:37 -0700 From: Carl <k0802647@telus.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Cannot create custom FreeBSD 7.0 install CD for serial console Message-ID: <48E87A3D.8030302@telus.net> In-Reply-To: <48E3DCB1.3010009@telus.net> References: <48E345AF.6050409@telus.net> <20081001112826.GA20013@icarus.home.lan> <48E3DCB1.3010009@telus.net>
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On Thu Oct 2 06:59:47 UTC 2008 Jonathan McKeown wrote: > On a system running 6.2-RELEASE, with a 6.2-RELEASE Disc 1 in the CD drive but > not mounted: > > mkdir serialcd > > tar xvfC /dev/acd0 serialcd > > These two commands created a directory tree in serialcd containing most of the > contents of the CD. There was a ``tar ignoring out-of-order file'' error, and > when I mounted the CD and ran > > diff -qr /cdrom serialcd > > it reported that RELNOTES.TXT differed - in fact the version in the serialcd > directory turned out to have zero length. [I suspect you could probably do > this comparison quicker with mtree, and I never did bother to fix it or find > out why it was happening] Thanks, Jonathan. So I've redone the process again. I'm working from the original ISO image instead of a physical CD copy of it, so I utilize step 4 from Jeremy Chadwick's document (http://jdc.parodius.com/freebsd/pxeboot_serial_install.html) to make the initial directory tree. There are no tar error messages. > I edited serialcd/boot/loader.conf to include the line > > console="comconsole" I did exactly that, although I also tried adding the following lines instead on a separate attempt: boot_multicons="NO" boot_serial="YES" comconsole_speed="115200" console="comconsole" > I then ran > > mkisofs -J -r -b boot/cdboot -no-emul-boot -o serialcd.iso serialcd > > and got an ISO image, serial.iso, which is about 600MB. Your switches are a little different from my original procedure, so this time I used yours. > The only drawback with this method is that the serial console only cuts in > just before the boot menu. I suspect that if you wanted to have a serial > console for every stage of the boot you would need to mess about with the > ramdisk image on the CD. So creating a boot.config in the root of the CD image cannot be used the way it is for a hard drive installation in order to solve that problem? Anyway, I didn't create a boot.config this time, so I should have ended up with a 7.0 equivalent of your 6.2 serialcd.iso, which I then burned and tried. End result? Abject failure again. All boot stages still use the internal console. Just after "Loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf" appears, there is a *very* long pause added as compared with the unmodified install CD. Eventually it resumes. Don't know why that's happening. Carl / K0802647
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