General 28 Sep 2005 06:22 am
A few hints for SunFire v20z users
I've had a heck of a time setting up the management on the slew of Sun SunFire v20z machines we've got. They've got this neat thing called the Service Processor (SP) which serves to provide out-of-band management for power, sensors, and console access. This I know about, and after fiddling with DHCP and static IPs have used the network connected feature for the SP. I followed the FreeBSD Handbook to set up console access via a serial port, and this allows the 'platform console' command in the SP to connect to the console on the machine.
But theres another way in, which I wanted to set up - the DB9 serial port on the back of the machine. I assumed it would just let me use it as COM1 as usual, and it would work as expected. Nope. I couldnt get it to listen to me.
After digging through a couple documents, I finally stumbled on one which is not on the main Sun documents site (at least linked)… This whitepaper provided the realization that the serial port on the back is not actually directly connected to the COM1 port on the machine - it's actually connected to the SP, using a different bps rate (9600 vs 115200 is a bit of a difference), which allows the same login access as via ssh.
This was a suprise, but lets me do what I need to do. The question I now have though, is what if you want to use that serial port for something other than a console port? How does that work? A question for another time, I guess.
