After various helpful discussions off-list, I have come to a point where there remains an issue concerning how to set the redirection of the console over a remote management console.
It boils down to where and how to set consdev to com0, and how to ensure that a remote session behaves nicely through the boot process and into a multi-user login seamlessly. There are three stagers to this: 1. how to ensure that one can choose from the initial boot menu - it's not much use if you can see the boot menu but not choose from it. 2. how to be sure that the hardware probe and rc.conf output can be viewed remotely in real time. 3. how to end up with a usable login session via the remote management console. I have found that setting consdev=com0 in boot.cfg defeats choice from the boot menu as does `installboot -e -v -o console=com0 ...` . What is more, no output from the hardware probe and rc.conf is visible remotely. Since my prime objective is to be able to fsck in single-user mode, this was bad news. However, dropping to the boot prompt and setting consdev to com0 does allow you to boot and see all the initial diagnostics (and get to a single-user shell). Adding the following line in boot.cfg has the same effect: menu=Boot single user:rndseed /etc/entropy-file;consdev com0; boot netbsd -s The fact that consdev=com0 in boot.cfg does not have the same effect does not align with the man page for boot.cfg(5). Additionally, an entry in /etc/ttys for /dev/tty00 is needed to give a clean multi-user terminal connection through the remote console. I have set all relevant line speeds to 115200 baud, and found no benefit is using 9600 baud at any point. I don't know how much of this is peculiar to the Fujitsu Primergy 1330 M3 R8 servers I am working on, but it's been a long and frustrating journey, alleviated only by the customary kindly helpfulness of the NetBSD community. -- Steve Blinkhorn <st...@prd.co.uk>
