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Re: console for Linux



>>>>>>>> On Sun, 7 Dec 1997, Gaal wrote:


 Gaal> I still don't understand what your requirement is. Are you
 Gaal> looking to redirect your dmesg to a serial tty? Cute, but what
 Gaal> of it? Are you looking to connect another box to your server's
 Gaal> console, that alanyses its output and decides on forcing a
 Gaal> reboot? And how will you do that? On what case will you decide
 Gaal> on a reboot?
 Gaal>
 Gaal> I am still convinced that this DOES have to do with stability.
 Gaal> OS stability. Because you're talking of a "console" that loads
 Gaal> with the kernel, it won't be worth anything when the kernel
 Gaal> dies; you're just stuck with one more respondless peripherial.
 Gaal> What can you do with a serial console that you can't do with
 Gaal> a monitor? Oh, of course *if* you find a BIOS smart enough to
 Gaal> boot from remote, *and* you buy another machine to eat your
 Gaal> console's messages, you'll be able to boot from remote -- but
 Gaal> that's only as reliable as your BIOS, two serial cards, the
 Gaal> software on the inspecting machine, and the inspecting machine
 Gaal> itself. Where's the reliability increase?
 Gaal>
 Gaal> > > > I am interested in both features, in order to have
 Gaal> > reliable production > > network servers running Linux. > Buy
 Gaal> > a hardware watchdog. These kind of answer is obvious, and I
 Gaal> > am not looking for the obvious, as it might be clear now. I
 Gaal> > don't need something that will decide when to boot my network
 Gaal> > server.
 Gaal>
 Gaal> At the risk of igniting something I don't want to ignite,
 Gaal> let me assure you that what you're looking for is completely
 Gaal> unobvious to me. :-)
 Gaal>
 Gaal> Gaal


It's very neat future (and I heard thats it's already implemented at
some 2.1 kernels, Vadik? I thing that was you who told me that...)
When you boot BSDi at HUJI it looks like that, first the usual bios
stuff, then the Boot.... line and.... nothing, everything else goes
to serial port. We have some Catalyst managing the serial traffic
around. As the result, we can boot, debug, single-user-mode the
servers without actually going to the console. Every hosts has it's
own <host>-serial extension which will point to it's console, end of
story.

thks,
borik
__
Boris D. Beletsky                           borik@bfr.co.il
Network Administrator                      borik@debian.org
Berger Financial Research,              borik@isracom.co.il
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