Proper Serial Console Support

I snarfed this from Daily DaemonNews, and it's very cool. If you administer a bunch of PC Unix servers (BSD, Linux, whatever) you probably miss the serial console that proper servers have. Once the OS is booting you can get serial output, but that doesn't help for modifying the BIOS. For that you need a monitor and keyboard. Enter the PC Weasel, an ISA board that pretends to be an MDA card, but actually stuffs the display out a serial port, and takes keyboard input and plugs it in to the keyboard buffer. So no need for a monitor now, just a serial connection. Probably the best thing is that if you buy one, you automatically get a source license for the microcontroller code, so you can customise it all you want.

Comments

Some server boards already have this

[_damnit_]

Intel has something of this sort on their "server" motherboards. They call it the Emergency Management Port. Here's their description:

The built-in Emergency Management Port (EMP) provides remote emergency access via modem or direct serial connection from the COM2 port regardless of the server's current state or network availability. The EMP console offers the following operating system-independent basic management features: system power up/down control, system reset, access to the chassis FRU inventory.

This does not appear to be as simply cool as a "real server's" console port, but it's better than monitor and keyboard.

Does anyone know if Intel will start supporting Forth toolkits (Open Boot in Sun world) with Itanium? If not, what do they plan on using?

If my post is screwed up, sorry. /. doesn't seem to be interpreting allowed HTML tags.


_damnit_

For Further Information...

[rbrander]

Have a look at the newsletter of the Calgary Unix Users Group, specifically last September's Issue and hit the "PC Weasel Released" article.

It contains an interview with Herb Peyerl, sometime NetBSD maven and the principal software designer, and some more photos.

But just a few off-the-cuff comments in response to previous posts:

• Herb mentioned the price to me a few weeks ago, and I already forgot - but it's in the very low hundreds;
• Custom ASICs weren't in the budget, that's for sure; cut them some slack, guys, they have to build a market first;
• The price will drop even before they get the huge volume required for custom ASIC chips; even a fair-sized production run will make a big difference.
• And as the web page itself points out, they really couldn't believe nobody else did this - they were finally driven to invent it themselves from need!

All this, and much more, in the interview.

BIOS support for serial console

[warlock]

OK, a few weeks ago I noticed there was an NT
box crashing along in our computer room, mostly
emmiting SMB traffic and broadcasting some radio
station via realaudio. I felt pitty for the poor
thing (dual PII-233, 256MB ECC RAM, pair of nice UW drives etc) and decided to install a real OS on
it.

Upon openning the case I realized it had an
on-board graphics card, albeit a sucky one,
so I discarded the ati rage pro that the nt
admin added. I then proceeded to install freebsd
on it from scratch. While I was tweaking the BIOS
settings (intel mobo, phoenix bios) I found an
option to redirect the console to a serial port :)

You should have seen the face of that NT admin
when he saw the box he setup a few months ago
attached to a vt420 doing what the NT box did and
outperforming it while at it.

I wonder why this is not more common - is it so
bloody hard for the BIOS to redirect the console
to a serial port? I don't think so. I really don't
like the idea of an add in board doing that for
you, it is a major kludge. Perhaps we should
make some noise to motherboard manufacturers
until they understand that serial console support
is a good thing, and it can be a selling point.

-W

Even better.. ethernet

[jonathanclark]

I want an ethernet version! Who uses serial these days anyway? I suppose you could write your own microcode on one of these things to talk to an ethernet card??

My thoughts

[Otterley]

I'm glad more people are beginning to realize that headless operation capability is a great asset to people who have to manage UNIX systems, and that having hardware support for such management is critical. Most UNIX systems vendors (such as Sun) have had this for years now.

However, my first impression of this card is "too little, too late."

First, as an earlier poster pointed out, it's ISA only, not PCI (and server-class motherboards supporting ISA are quickly becoming extinct).

Second, look at that card! It's frigging huge! It looks more like a FPGA prototype; I'm sure the designers could have it converted to a single chip ASIC and make the card 75% smaller.

Third, the last thing many of us who are maintaining machines with 1 or 2 rack unit heights is another card to try to fit in there. Some of us would like to use what little room we have for things like Gigabit Ethernet cards.

Finally, I'm not sure there will be much need for this in a few months. Award (now Phoenix) has a gorgeous ServerBIOS (which Intel is using on all of its new server motherboards) which supports serial console support. We're using one of their motherboards in all our new systems (I believe that VA Linux Systems uses them too) and we think they kick ass.

However, even serial console support isn't perfect. After all, how do you send the three-finger salute over a serial line?