[SunHELP] headless booting woes

[George Munk]

Brian,

Your serial port problem sounds exactly like one that I had. I also beat my
head against the wall before I finally found the problem. I had used admintool
to enable logging in to serial port A by unchecking "Initialize only". A bug in
admintool changed the EEPROM parameter ttya-ignore-cd from the default of true
to false. By the way, the Sun bug description (4202998) appears to be incorrect
in that is says "true" when it should say "false" and vice-versa. The eeprom
man page appears to be correct in describing ttya-ignore-cd usage.

So, the short answer to your problem may be "eeprom ttya-ignore-cd=true" from
the UNIX command line or "setenv ttya-ignore-cd true" from the "ok" prompt.

While I'm on the subject, I have seen admins criticized for using admintool. I
personally don't care for it either but I don't know of any other way to enable
logging in to a serial port. Does anyone know of a command line equivalent to
unchecking "Initialize only" for a serial port in admintool?


Thanks,
George Munk
Iomega Corp.
Phone: 801-332-3944
FAX: 801-332-3900
Email: munkg at iomega.com



On 04-Jan-2001 Brian Hechinger wrote:
> ugh, i can't win.  i moved over the weekend.  it was a giant pain in the ass,
> but the benefit, of course, is that i get to change things around with the
> computers. one of those things, is i pulled the TurboGX frambuffer out of the
> SPARCstation 5 that i am using as a router/firewall for my DSL internet 
> connection.  if there is nothing plugged into Serial Port A, then the OS
> hangs
> right before where it sets up the network interfaces.  as soon as i plug my
> laptop into the serial port (even without a terminal program running) the SUN
> the proceeds to boot.  i can then remove the serial cable and all is happy, 
> it's just getting the OS off the ground that is the problem.
> 
> i tried the /etc/default/kbd as recommended previously, and while that does
> solve the serial cable unplug = break issue, it isn't helping one bit here.
> 
> other than what is stated here, i'm stumped.  i don't mind having to plug the
> laptop in when i have to reboot, but what if i'm not here?  guess it's time
> to
> plug that modem into the serial port to be remote console.  i _have_ been 
> wanting to do that for a while now.  although i'd rather have the "right" 
> solution since i have 5 more SUN boxes here at my house, and i don't want to
> have to plug stuff into all of them just to get them to boot (assuming i will
> have the same problems with them)
> 
>   ........
> 
> thanks!!!
> 
> -brian
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