On Mar 20, 2012, at 4:24 AM, Stuart Henderson wrote:
> On 2012-03-20, Ulf Zimmermann <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Trying pfsense and FreeBSD9.0 via pxeboot, I get at some point to see
>> the swirly on my serial terminal but nothing else, it is as if all other
>> text is white on white or black on black. Has anyone seen something
>> similar? I am not very picky about what I put on these, as soon I get
>> ... a NTP daemon, as I want to use these as our NTP masters for the
>> internal network.
> 
> This sounds like the boot loader hasn't been told to put the console
> on the serial port, so you don't get output after the kernel has
> started running.
> 
> I don't know how to set this for pfsense/FreeBSD, there should be
> something in documentation for the boot loader. On OpenBSD you
> either type 'set tty com0' into the boot loader, or place that line
> in /etc/boot.conf on the tftp server that you pxeboot from.


Another common problem is that most OSes assume a serial console speed of 9,600 
and Seokris devices default to 19,200.  So assuming you start your terminal 
[emulation] at 19,200, as soon as the OS picks up from the BIOS, you loose the 
output or it becomes garbled.  With FreeBSD there are three stages that all 
have to be changed if you want to stay at 19,200, so I find it easier to change 
the BIOS and terminal to 9,600 and not fight it. 

The FreeBSD handbook has a section on how to use a serial console 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-advanced.html#HEADLESS-INSTALL
   More details can be found 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/serialconsole-setup.html

-Jed
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