[ale] Serial consoles

[Todd Graham Lewis]

On Fri, 17 Jan 1997, Byron A Jeff wrote:

> There's a patch. Do this: goto deja news and search for NFS swap for linux.
> a recent posting talks about it and gives an FTP site. On that FTP site
> there is also a kernel patch for serial boot messages.

According to inside sources, this should be in the main kernel tree RSN.

> Well my personal opinion is that it's more effective to put a cheap (like
> monochome, Hercules, or CGA) monitor and keyboard because there are too
> many possible failure modes on both hardware and booting to trust the serial
> port.

Bzzt, try again.  Imagine you are, say, an Internet Service Provider.
Imagine further that you have to fit all of your equipment into a very
small space.  Imagine that this space is remote from your main office.
Imagine finally that you have many servers to fit in this site.

The important part is not the space requirement, although that helps.  The
requirement is that you have to be able to reboot machines remotely and
interact with the boot loader, select which kernel to boot, etc.  This is
impossible unless you have serial consoles.

Linux is virtually alone among Unices in not supporting serial consoles,
and it really needs to be fixed.  They are indispensable.

__
Todd Graham Lewis             Linux!                 Core Engineering
Mindspring Enterprises  tlewis at mindspring.com   (800) 719 4664, x2804