Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2008 03:41:51 -0700 From: Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu@FreeBSD.org> To: Carl <k0802647@telus.net> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Cannot create custom FreeBSD 7.0 install CD for serial console Message-ID: <20081005104151.GA82084@icarus.home.lan> In-Reply-To: <48E87A3D.8030302@telus.net> References: <48E345AF.6050409@telus.net> <20081001112826.GA20013@icarus.home.lan> <48E3DCB1.3010009@telus.net> <48E87A3D.8030302@telus.net>
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On Sun, Oct 05, 2008 at 01:26:37AM -0700, Carl wrote: > 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? Correct. It has to "be done differently", since the bootstraps used from the CD are different than those on a hard disk. I choose not to use the loader.conf variables because I feel they get read "too late" into the boot process. For the record, I've never done a CD-based install via serial. -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
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