> From: Geoffrey Bennett <geoffrey@tafe.sa.edu.au>
> Subject: Running headless
> Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 02:30:35 +0930 (CST)
>
> I am running a linux box without a video card/monitor at the moment.
> It's working fine (except that it requires a keyboard to boot for
> some unknown reason), but I'm wondering... when things aren't working
> fine, what am I to do then? I've got the serial port connected to
> another box so I can fix things if the ether is down, but I don't get
> kernel messages there, and if the system fails to boot I won't be
> able to figure out why.
>
> So I guess I've got two questions... 1) how do other people deal with
> this problem? and 2) are there patches available to the kernel so I
> can have a serial console?
I havn't tried something like this yet, but I'm planning to do
so. Here is what I've found out.
- lilo can be configured to send boot messages to serial line, too.
- linux cannot redirect console to serial line, yet. But there are
some hooks which make that possible. In linux/drivers/char/console.c
you can find a call
register_console(console_print);
which registers system console as output channel for printk's. Now if
someone writes a serial_print() function which gets activated by some
lilo argument like
console-serial=2,2400n8
then kernel should initialize tty02 (COM3) as serial console with 2400
baud, no parity and 8 bits. Syntax is taken from lilo's serial
argument.
One could think of further capabilities like redirecting to parallel
port connected to a harcopy printer like the old decwriter on an VAX
11/780 with
console-printer=1
for using lp1 (LPT2).
- - Andreas
- --
Andreas Koppenhoefer, Student der Universitaet Stuttgart, BR Deutschland
prefered languages: German, English, C, perl ("Just another Perl hacker,")
SMTP: koppenas@informatik.uni-stuttgart.de (university address)
Andreas.Koppenhoefer@studbox.uni-stuttgart.de (my home address)
privat: Belaustr. 5/3, D-70195 Stuttgart, Germany,
Earth, Sector ZZ9 plural Z alpha
phone: +49 711 694111 and +49 711 6999006 (19-22h MEZ=GMT+1)
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