Serial console issue

[dgux]

Hey people

I’m trying to deploy an image to a machine with serial only console and for this to work I will have to modify the iPXE boot to disable vga and use /dev/ttyS0 instead.
Any idea how to do that?

[george1421]

@dgux I can’t tell you the exact steps, but I think I can give you a push in the right direction.

First of all here is the ipxe reference to serial console. https://ipxe.org/console

Here is a how to for compiling the latest version of iPXE: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/15826/updating-compiling-the-latest-version-of-ipxe

Now I would start out by cloning the fog git repo to a new directory leaving your original install point (typically /root/fogproject) along here. So you can put it in /opt/custom/fogproject or someplace unique. If you were to use your main install point what you will change will impact any reinstalls in the future.

So lets say you did this

mkdir -p /opt/custom
cd /opt/custom
git clone git clone https://github.com/fogproject/fogproject.git fogproject

That will change your build directory to /opt/custom/fogproject. Then follow the tutorial above. In the /opt/custom/fogproject/utils/FOGiPXE Path there will be the 3 .h files you o will need to edit to enable the serial console. That info is in the first link above. Update the .h files then run the buildipxe.sh That will rebuild the latest ipxe files and keep them in the /opt/custom/fogproject file path (so not to mix your current FOG Project supplied boot files with the custom ones you just made.

Now run this command to find the location of your custom crafted ipxe.efi files find /opt/custom/fogproject -name ipxe.efi This will give you the path where the newly compiled files are located. Now rename as you copy over the needed boot loaders (undionly.kpxe or ipxe.efi).

[Sebastian Roth]

@dgux Will be interesing to see if you can get this to work. Though iPXE is just the starting point. You will need to set Linux kernel parameters for serial console as well. That’s pretty easy within the specific host settings. But I am not exactly sure if we have serial console driver compiled into the official kernel yet. Not a big deal though. See how far you get and keep us posted.