I have just installed OpenBSD 3.9 on a net4511. My root partition is read-only, and I have a tarball unzipped into an mfs partition for /var upon boot. /dev/ttyp00-01 and /dev/ptyp00-01 are symlinked to /var/dev so that they are r/w. At the login prompt over the serial console I am able to log in and access the system with minicom under linux or hyperterminal on windows, however I am not able to input anything before then. Initially when "boot>" is displayed, if I try to input "boot -s" to enter single user mode "b" is the only character that actually gets entered. After that they system seems to freeze and not respond to anything else that I send it. What seems odd to me is that if I try to access the same machine with another OpenBSD box with the command "cu -l /dev/cua00 -s 9600," I am able to enter the full "boot -s" and get to single user mode without any problems.
I have the lines: console "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" vt220 on secure tty00 "/usr/libexec/getty std.9600" vt220 on secure in /etc/ttys, although I don't believe it is far enough in the boot process to matter. I don't understand why cu under OpenBSD would work while minicom or hyperterminal wouldn't under the same circumstances.
