Cannot create custom FreeBSD 7.0 install CD for serial console

[Carl]

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?

Anyway, I didn't create a boot.config this time, so I should have ended 
up with a 7.0 equivalent of your 6.2 serialcd.iso, which I then burned 
and tried. End result? Abject failure again. All boot stages still use 
the internal console.

Just after "Loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf" appears, there is a 
*very* long pause added as compared with the unmodified install CD. 
Eventually it resumes. Don't know why that's happening.

Carl                                             / K0802647