Building a Headless FreeBSD Virtual System

[Ryan Frederick]

When you define the virtual serial port in VirtualBox for the guest VM 
one of the options available for connection of the port to the host 
system is a named pipe (I believe it's called "Host Pipe" in the 
configuration). You can then specify whatever named pipe on the host 
system you wish to attach the VM's serial port to then use a utility 
such as `socat` to present the I/O from the named pipe as a PTY device. 
 From there it's simply a matter of using a utility such as `cu` or 
`screen` to connect to the PTY.

Ryan

On 08/29/2012 10:16 AM, Martin McCormick wrote:
> 	I am using Oracle's VirtualBox package for the Mac. It is free and I
> am not sure that Dollars would get past the issue I have, here.
>
> 	VirtualBox uses Microsoft's remote desktop as the one
> and only output channel to allow remote access to the virtual
> system one is creating and this is really bad design for
> computer users who are blind and use screen readers. Pictures of
> text just don't work. If you had some very complex system with
> OCR, it might sort of work, but such systems don't exist as a
> drop-in for a good old ASCII terminal so that's not an option.
>
> 	So far, I downloaded the bootonly ISO image of
> FreeBSD9.0, mounted it and added the following loader.conf:
>
> boot_multicons="YES"
> boot_serial="YES"
> comconsole_speed="115200"
> console="comconsole,vidconsole"
> vesa_load="YES"
>
> 	Next, I used VirtualBoxmanage to define the disk and
> create the machine with a virtual IDE controller that is pointed
> to the ISO image for FreeBSD9.0 with the serial console.
>
> 	Has anybody been able to use VirtualBox and a fake
> serial console to get around the remote desktop non solution?
>
> 	I will probably have to add a virtual serial port in the
> machine definition one puts in the original machine build, but I
> am not sure this doesn't just go to that remote desktop channel
> where it gets scrubbed of any usefulness except for eyeballs on
> screens.
>
> 	This whole thing looks very promising but there's got to
> be a way around that shoe which doesn't fit in the form of that
> GUI remote desk top.
>
> 	In my case, the machine build goes without error but I
> can't tell yet if it is even booting.
>
> 	Mac's, by the way, have a relatively good screen reader
> built in but VirtualBox doesn't work with it, something that is
> a problem with a number of third-party programs especially when
> they were originally developed for Windows. This, of course,
> does not pertain to the main topic of this list, but I say it
> here so that you know I am aware you are supposed to be able to
> use the GUI on the Mac to manage your new virtual system.
> Essentially, the local GUI and the remote desktop don't work for
> me for the same reasons.
>
> 	My hope is to get FreeBSD running as a guest system on
> a powerful Mac and retire an old Dell server with noisy fans and
> several BTU of heat output which is in the realm of 15 years old
> and will probably retire itself at some random date in the
> future.
>
> 	Thank you for any good suggestions.
>
> Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK
> Systems Engineer
> OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group
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