Date: Wed, 17 Jan 1996 18:58:37 +0100 (MET) From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: gavin@ormond.unimelb.edu.au (Gavin Cameron) Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Serial console - any documentation Message-ID: <199601171758.SAA04097@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <199601171109.WAA12268@gateway.ormond.unimelb.edu.au> from "Gavin Cameron" at Jan 17, 96 10:09:03 pm
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As Gavin Cameron wrote: > > I need to set up a freebsd machine using a serial console. I had a look > around the doco that was installed when I upgraded to 2.1.0 and also on > www.freebsd.org, but couldn't find anything telling me what to do. Seems that nobody ever wrote it. The original intention was that the boot block detects the absence of a keyboard itself, and automagically switches to a serial console if no keyboard is present. Due to the nature of PC hardware, the omission of a function to test the BIOS' keyboard check result, and the limited size of the bootblocks, this function tends to jam an alarming amount of PC keyboards, and has been disabled (for now :). You could re-enable it in /sys/i386/boot/biosboot/boot.c (it's #if 0'ed), and see if it works for you. Or you could uncomment the line with -DFORCE_COMCONSOLE in the Makefile, to always use a serial console. Either way, rebuild and reinstall the bootblocks, and then run disklabel -B in order to put them to your disk. (NB: this will destroy your fdisk table.) Finally, SGMLify this answer, and submit it for the handbook. :-) -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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