[gentoo-server] Grub over serial ports at high speeds

[gentoo-server] Grub over serial ports at high speeds

[Andrew D. Fant]

Morning all,
   I have a Dell 6850 that I am running in a data center environment with
Gentoo.  There is no KVM capacity for it, so I have set it up with serial
console support. Dell's console redirection works great at 115200 baud, and I've
had no trouble with boot messages going to the tty at that speed either, but
Grub refuses to work over the serial port at that speed.  When I add the
following lines to grub.conf:

serial --unit=0 --speed=115200 --word=8 --parity=no
terminal serial

the system just sits there mute and I have to boot from the liveCD and disable
the serial terminal option.

Any suggestions about this, or do I need to break down and go back to lilo,
which even though deprecated does work with high-speed serial connections.

Thanks,
	Andy

-- 
Andrew Fant           | The lion and the calf shall lie   | Disclaimer:
andrew.fant@tufts.edu | down together, but the calf won't | Do you REALLY
UIT/USG               | get much sleep.                   | think I can
Tufts University      |                  W. Allen         | speak for Tufts?
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RE: [gentoo-server] Grub over serial ports at high speeds

[Ewald Wasscher]

Hello Andy,

Personally I'd install a Dell Remote Access Card (DRAC card) in the machine. It gives you KVM, hardware reset and more.
It costs a little, but I imagine that you can afford it if you can afford buying such a server :-)

Ewald

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew D. Fant [mailto:andrew.fant@tufts.edu] 
Sent: dinsdag 10 oktober 2006 15:52
To: gentoo-server@lists.gentoo.org
Subject: [gentoo-server] Grub over serial ports at high speeds

Morning all,
   I have a Dell 6850 that I am running in a data center environment with Gentoo.  There is no KVM capacity for it, so I
have set it up with serial console support. Dell's console redirection works great at 115200 baud, and I've had no
trouble with boot messages going to the tty at that speed either, but Grub refuses to work over the serial port at that
speed.  When I add the following lines to grub.conf:

serial --unit=0 --speed=115200 --word=8 --parity=no terminal serial

the system just sits there mute and I have to boot from the liveCD and disable the serial terminal option.

Any suggestions about this, or do I need to break down and go back to lilo, which even though deprecated does work with
high-speed serial connections.

Thanks,
	Andy

-- 
Andrew Fant           | The lion and the calf shall lie   | Disclaimer:
andrew.fant@tufts.edu | down together, but the calf won't | Do you REALLY
UIT/USG               | get much sleep.                   | think I can
Tufts University      |                  W. Allen         | speak for Tufts?
--
gentoo-server@gentoo.org mailing list



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Re: [gentoo-server] Grub over serial ports at high speeds

[Ronan Mullally]

Hi Andy,

On Tue, 10 Oct 2006, Andrew D. Fant wrote:

> serial --unit=0 --speed=115200 --word=8 --parity=no
> terminal serial
>
> the system just sits there mute and I have to boot from the liveCD and disable
> the serial terminal option.

I'm running a bunch of 2850s with the following:

 serial --unit=0 --speed=57600
 terminal --timeout=6 serial console

There's an item in the BIOS to enable or disable console redirection after
boot - you make need to tweak that.

I'm running the 2850s with DRAC cards (but there's only a single async
serial port on the back of each box) and needed to issue a few 'racadm'
commands before the serial port would do anything - you may need to do
the same.


-Ronan
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Re: [gentoo-server] Grub over serial ports at high speeds

[Andrew D. Fant]

Ewald Wasscher wrote:
> Hello Andy,
> 
> Personally I'd install a Dell Remote Access Card (DRAC card) in the machine. It gives you KVM, hardware reset and more.
> It costs a little, but I imagine that you can afford it if you can afford buying such a server :-)
> 
> Ewald
>

Ewald,

We have one installed, but the software to drive it hasn't been particularly
willing to be installed under Gentoo.  Needless to say, Dell has been less than
concerned about this.

-- 
Andrew Fant           | The lion and the calf shall lie   | Disclaimer:
andrew.fant@tufts.edu | down together, but the calf won't | Do you REALLY
UIT/USG               | get much sleep.                   | think I can
Tufts University      |                  W. Allen         | speak for Tufts?
-- 
gentoo-server@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-server] Grub over serial ports at high speeds

[Ian P. Christian]

On 10/10/06 Andrew D. Fant wrote:
> We have one installed, but the software to drive it hasn't been 
> particularly willing to be installed under Gentoo. Needless to say, 
> Dell has been less than concerned about this.

suffering from the same thing - do mail the list if you get it sorted :)

-- 
Ian P. Christian ~ http://pookey.co.uk
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