How to receive BIOS console redirection?

Hiroharu Tamaru tamaru at myn.rcast.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Sun Aug 15 05:09:20 PDT 2004


At Sat, 14 Aug 2004 02:08:18 +0900, Hiroharu Tamaru wrote:

> I have a Supermicrio P4SC8 motherboard and I want to receive
> its BIOS console redirect output on another FreeBSD box.
> The motherboard is checking for *something* to see if a
> serial terminal is attached, and rejects the link.
> 
> I tried 'tip com1' with an /etc/remote setup of
> 
> com1:dv=/dev/cuaa0:br#115200:pa=none:
> 
> and ports/comms/kermit with 
> 
> set line /dev/cuaa0
> set speed 115200
> set carrier-watch off
> connect
> 
> and in both cases, the motherboard times out and abandons
> the redirection.

Thank you for those who replied to me off-list.

Encouraged by some working examples, I retried the
investigation, and now I figured out what was wrong with my
setup.

The motherboard seems to be checking for some terminal
escape sequences.  At first I was working on FreeBSD console
(TERM=cons25), and that was the cause of failure.  Then I
tried it from xterm, and it successfully started to
redirect.  But that was not the end of the story ;-p

With xterm I could get console messages redirected, but I
couldn't enter the BIOS setup menus.  It was not reading the
"DEL" key that I typed.  So then I changed to screen
(ports/misc/screen), and finally I can enter the BIOS menues
and all.

So to summarize, when I work inside screen, both tip and
kermit worked well with the config shown above.
cu -s 115200 -l /dev/cuaa0
also worked well.  I was also sugested with minicom, but
that I could not configure well to get everything working
(it has many features and I didn't look into it that much).

I still cannot enter the Intel NIC's setup menu, which is
initiated with Ctrl-S.  And for 3ware RAID BIOS (entered
with Alt-3), the menu is entered (as verified on video
console), but the output is not redirected to the serial
port, though, the keys I type on the serial side are sent
and recoganized by the RAID BIOS.  But I'd say those are
another story, and I'm happy that I can fiddle with the main
BIOS setup for now.

Thank you very much for your help.
-- 
Hiroharu Tamaru


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