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Proper Serial Console Support

Posted by Nik on from the NP:-backup-tapes-redux dept.

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.

1 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. My thoughts by Otterley · · Score: 5

    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?