2.12 Advanced Installation Guide (Headless Install)

[Aaron Gibson]

All-

Just for clarification, it does work.  The problem that I was having was a
due to a mis-configuration in the BIOS.  BIOS was set to send serial output
to a COM port that did not physically exist.  Once I fixed that everything
worked fine.  Though, it would be nice if there were a command line switch
that could be placed in the boot.config file to enable serial console login.

Thank you both for your help.

Aaron Gibson
aaron at the-gibsons.org

-----Original Message-----
From: "Dag-Erling Smørgrav" [mailto:des at des.no] 
Sent: Monday, September 27, 2004 7:07 AM
To: Ceri Davies
Cc: Aaron Gibson; doc at FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: 2.12 Advanced Installation Guide (Headless Install)

Ceri Davies <ceri at submonkey.net> writes:
> Thanks Aaron - I don't believe that this is correct:
>
>    Here is where you must set the floppy to boot into a serial console.
You
>    have to make a file called boot.config containing /boot/loader -h. All
>    this does is pass a flag to the bootloader to boot into a serial
>    console.
>    
>    # echo "/boot/loader -h" > boot.config
>
> I've always used just "-h" here; I'll test it and update it if
> necessary.  You're saying that it *does* work though?

It should work.  You can put anything in /boot.config that you'd type
at the boot1 prompt, including the disk and slice to boot from
(default: 0:ad(0,a)) and the binary to load (default: /boot/loader).
You can even set it to "/boot/kernel/kernel" to bypass the loader
altogether, though you won't get a fully functional system (kldload
won't work, amongst other things)

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no