Cannot create custom FreeBSD 7.0 install CD for serial console

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Sun, Oct 05, 2008 at 01:26:37AM -0700, Carl wrote:
> On Thu Oct 2 06:59:47 UTC 2008 Jonathan McKeown wrote:
>> On a system running 6.2-RELEASE, with a 6.2-RELEASE Disc 1 in the CD 
>> drive but not mounted:
>>
>> mkdir serialcd
>>
>> tar xvfC /dev/acd0 serialcd
>>
>> These two commands created a directory tree in serialcd containing most 
>> of the contents of the CD. There was a ``tar ignoring out-of-order 
>> file'' error, and when I mounted the CD and ran
>>
>> diff -qr  /cdrom serialcd
>>
>> it reported that RELNOTES.TXT differed - in fact the version in the 
>> serialcd directory turned out to have zero length. [I suspect you could 
>> probably do this comparison quicker with mtree, and I never did bother 
>> to fix it or find out why it was happening]
>
> Thanks, Jonathan. So I've redone the process again. I'm working from the  
> original ISO image instead of a physical CD copy of it, so I utilize  
> step 4 from Jeremy Chadwick's document  
> (http://jdc.parodius.com/freebsd/pxeboot_serial_install.html) to make  
> the initial directory tree. There are no tar error messages.
>
>> I edited serialcd/boot/loader.conf to include the line
>>
>> console="comconsole"
>
> I did exactly that, although I also tried adding the following lines  
> instead on a separate attempt:
>
>  boot_multicons="NO"
>  boot_serial="YES"
>  comconsole_speed="115200"
>  console="comconsole"
>
>> I then ran
>>
>> mkisofs -J -r -b boot/cdboot -no-emul-boot -o serialcd.iso serialcd
>>
>> and got an ISO image, serial.iso, which is about 600MB.
>
> Your switches are a little different from my original procedure, so this  
> time I used yours.
>
>> The only drawback with this method is that the serial console only cuts 
>> in just before the boot menu. I suspect that if you wanted to have a 
>> serial console for every stage of the boot you would need to mess about 
>> with the ramdisk image on the CD.
>
> So creating a boot.config in the root of the CD image cannot be used the  
> way it is for a hard drive installation in order to solve that problem?

Correct.  It has to "be done differently", since the bootstraps used
from the CD are different than those on a hard disk.  I choose not to
use the loader.conf variables because I feel they get read "too late"
into the boot process.

For the record, I've never done a CD-based install via serial.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |