From: Stephen How (stephenhow@mac.com)
Date: Tue Mar 25 2008 - 21:59:12 EST
Thanks everyone for the help getting a remote system console working
through the ELOM 3.09 over SSH for my SunFire X2100 M2, to my Mac.
original post: http://www.sunmanagers.org/pipermail/sunmanagers/2008-March/045486.html
I'm now able to see and control the Grub menu, then see all the boot
messages for my Ubuntu 7.10 kernel.
Thanks especially to Sandor and Crist.
Here's a summary for the problems I encountered, and how I fixed
them. Hopefully, someone will find this helpful, and save a lot of
time.
1. Contrary to the X2100 M2 manual, the service processor (SP) doesn't
flash the Power/OK led on the front panel in standby mode. It does
boot up the SP, and DHCP's correctly, but the led doesn't blink to
tell you it's up. Don't panic, it's probably up. You can arp -a, or
check your router's DHCP log to find out where the SP is on your
network.
2. I didn't understand that you need to do a lot of configuration for
the serial port, in several places, to get the console working. This
wasn't described in the manual, which apparently assumes you know all
about serial ports and consoles. This is my first server, so I had no
idea what was wrong when I just couldn't run "start /SP/AgentInfo/
console" at the ELOM CLI, and get the console output. Nothing came
out, and I was lost for a solution.
A little background theory that makes everything much clearer:
The ELOM has an internal serial port that connects to the host serial
port. This is what makes it a bridge from the serial port to the
remote (SSH) console. I imagine the same serial port is also
connected to the external DB9 RS-232 port. At any rate, the host
(system) application has to configure for this serial port. You'll
need to find what the ELOM serial port is set to. I set mine to
115200 baud, 8-bit, no parity, stop=1.
Then you need to pass the serial port parameters to Grub, and to the
kernel. (This is really the root of the problem. Why isn't the
console abstracted from the serial port at the BIOS level? Otherwise,
we need to configure the serial port in Grub in two places. And, I
haven't figured out how to get things like an Ubuntu distro CD to
interact with the console.)
You'll need to set up Grub via the /boot/grub/menu.lst file with the
following lines:
# configure for SunFire X2100 M2 internal serial port
serial --unit=1 --speed=115200 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1
# redirect grub to console (instead of physical KVM) after 30s timeout
(KVM override by "press any key")
terminal --timeout=30 serial console
You'll also need to add some arguments to the Grub kernel line to get
it to output to the console. For example,
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-server root=/dev/md0 ro quiet
splash console=tty1 console=ttyS1,115200n8
You'll need to set up ttyS1 in your Ubuntu installation. More info: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SerialConsoleHowto
for solaris: http://www.sunmanagers.org/pipermail/summaries/2007-February/007955.html
3. Grub uses the alternate v and ^ keys for down-arrow and up-arrow,
respectively (used to select the boot kernel image). My Mac keyboard
maps up-arrow and down-arrow to different codes than Grub expects. I
searched around for a solution, until I realised v (the "vee" key) and
^ (the carat key) are alternates for the arrow keys.
4. The Java-based remote KVM doesn't work on my Mac OS 10.5.2 (JRE
1.5) on Safari 3.1 or Firefox 2.0.0.12. The application starts up,
and shows the same title bar menu as the manual, but there's no
internal window that's supposed to mirror the system. It wouldn't be
the ideal way to go for a remote console even if it worked.
Steve
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