Hi there, I've replaced my old desktop with a laptop and a server, which is mostly working great. Naturally, the server is running FreeBSD-stable. It's built on an intel i3 MiniITX motherboard that has lots of SATA sockets, a respectable number of USB sockets, gigabit ethernet, eSATA, DVI, ... but no serial ports or PS/2 keyboard or mouse ports. Most of the time this is fine, but I've found that sometimes it is very nice to be able to debug something at a console. Particularly if something goes wrong when doing an upgrade of some sort. I've discovered that I can use the old VGA screen and USB keyboard for a console if I have them plugged in at boot time, but if something goes wrong after boot, plugging a keyboard in doesn't seem to help.
If I find a USB-to-RS232 dongle, will the console mechanism be able to find it? I worry that only legacy-16550-ish serial ports need apply. Any other possibilities or common practices? Oh: the other thing about this system: I can't warm-start it, have to power down and then manually hit the power-on button. Attempting to reboot leaves the console sitting at something like "Stopping other CPUs" forever. I assume that this is a BIOS config problem, but haven't found the right control knob yet. I've tried turning hyperthreading on and off: no difference. Reading the kernel code around that message suggests that rebooting involves getting the keyboard controller to send an NMI, and I wonder if the legacy-free no-keyboard state of my system is having an effect on that, too? Cheers, -- Andrew _______________________________________________ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
