console access

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Sun, Jun 08, 2008 at 10:52:37PM +1000, Andrew Snow wrote:
> Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
>> Supermicro IPMI cards are notoriously buggy.  A few of the system
>> engineers at Yahoo! who I know continually bitch and moan about how
>> horrible they are.  My advice: do not install the IPMI card which is
>> causing your problems.
>
> The remote KVM control feature was an important requirement so the card is 
> staying.  Luckily it uses the Intel gigabit NIC which seems to work well in 
> 7-STABLE, I have no complaints so far.  Every feature works well except 
> virtual media.
>
>> Booting FreeBSD off of USB devices is known to be broken; see "BTX,
>> boot2, and loader" section at the below URL:
>>
>> http://wiki.freebsd.org/JeremyChadwick/Commonly_reported_issues
>
> Thats interesting - I regularly use USB sticks to boot freebsd as its 
> easier for installation on cluster machines/routers that lack CDROM drives. 
>  I've used it on, I think, half a dozen different 
> motherboards/architectures and its worked well on all of them, the
> Supermicro box was the only broken one.

Okay, so then your original comment ("The same thing happened when
trying to use a USB CDROM drive, so I suspect USB boot support is at
fault somehow") might actually not be caused by FreeBSD at all?  The
reason I say that:

> Because virtual media emulates a USB device I'm pretty sure thats why it 
> wasnt working - the USB problem, not a problem with the IPMI card.

What Supermicro box is having USB booting problems?

I'm currently in a battle with Supermicro regarding the PDSMi+ not
properly booting certain models of USB flash drives:

http://koitsu.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/supermicro-pdsmi-bios-bugs/
http://koitsu.wordpress.com/2008/04/26/supermicro-pdsmi-bios-bugs-part-2/

Supermicro currently has both of my USB flash drives which I reported
(two different) problems with, and they have confirmed the bug, but are
"unsure what's causing it".  The last time I heard from them was 3 weeks
ago, stating "we're still working on it".  (I'd really like my USB
drives back......)

I would not be surprised if the same problem affected USB CDROMs.

-- 
| 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 |