So I just figured this nifty trick out. I provisioned a pair of servers based on supermicro X9SC motherboard, which has a built-in ILOM processor, and that provides a serial-over-lan serial port in addition to other administrative features.
It was exceptionally easy to convince pfsense to use that port as its console and to provide the menu on it. There are exactly three changes necessary after installing full pfsense. 1) edit /boot/loader.conf to add these lines: hint.uart.2.at="isa" hint.uart.2.port="0x3E8" hint.uart.2.flags="0x10" hint.uart.0.flags="0x00" This will enable serial port 2 as console, and disable serial port 0 as console. The FreeBSD handbook says that changing the serial port requires rebuild from source, but it doesn't seem to be true. 2) edit /etc/ttys: Change the line for ttyu2 to be: ttyu2 "/usr/libexec/getty bootupcli" cons25 on secure Basically, set the console type "cons25", turn it "on" and change the parameter to getty to be "bootupcli". 3) create /boot.config with these contents: "-Dh -S115200" Reboot. Ensure that the BIOS has the console redirect to the SOL enabled. You should now see the full bios, boot block, and kernel boot to the SOL, and finally the pfsense menu too. Question: which of these files will be smashed on pfsense upgrade? I already discovered that /boot.config gets overwritten when I upload a saved config from an embedded pfsense installation. _______________________________________________ List mailing list List@lists.pfsense.org http://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list
