On Sat, 9 Jul 2005, Gregory S. Youngblood wrote: > > Sounds a lot like what I do. Do you hang a modem on the serial port?
I have an Equinox serial card which still supports some old dialup/ISDN modems and had a lot of empty ports on it. It's our last Redhat system. (5.2 or something with a 2.2 kernel) I don't like upgrading it because it has a closed source driver and it often always has problems. > Either way, isn't there support for serial port console installs with Trustix? I have not checked 3 for it; have only done PXEboot installs so far. How would I know? Plug in a serial cable and wait? Perhaps a TSL person can tell us. > But, it should be possible to create a custom > install CD that boots directly with the console going to serial port right > away. Yes, seems like it would be fairly easy. Currently I try to use a generic rescue CD that I added sshd to but sometimes a system won't boot from CD (old hardware or no drive). I tried to get PXEboot going but it's hard to walk people through BIOS mods. Using one rescue CD precludes burning custom install CD's everytime a new OS release comes out. And we need the rescue disc anyway for bare metal restores from backup. Everything else you said mirrors my own experiences. I avoid using the installer at all; copying tarballs with scp is more reliable and faster. Likewise I switched from other distros due to bloat and so on. I am far more comfortable with RPM than Debian APT. Also I really like swup. So far using TSL I find that with 2.2 I can almost always drop in RH9 packages if something is not already available for TSL. X11 on server consoles is for Windows converts! Most of the systems are clones of one another now. Once I got one going the way I wanted it, I copied it to its neighbors. This makes maintenance easy because all systems are so similar. > One thing I have yet to get working has been the grub boot once directive. Have not seen it. I have been thinking about PXEboot scenarios but could not get PXEboot going smoothly enough a year ago. Too much else to do. I'd like to have PXEboot as the first boot selection and if it times out, then it goes to hard drive. Then I can turn off the dhcp/tftp server under normal circumstances. This means a slightly slower boot but so what? Then to get rescue mode I would turn on the boot server and tell the 'hands' to push the reset button (or use a remote power strip). The system would netboot into rescue mode and I'd be able to log in. If this worked well enough a couple of my systems wouldn't even need hard drives. Set up for PXEboot seems inconsistent though -- BIOS level support seems to vary widely from one system to another. I look forward to playing with LinuxBios eventually but deployment for us is years away. We stretch every dime as far as it can go. I am moving from 10BT to 100BT now. -- Brian Wilson Corvallis, Oregon 541-368-4120 _______________________________________________ tsl-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.trustix.org/mailman/listinfo/tsl-discuss
