> > So in summary; there's nothing that will "decide there is no built-in
> > console" unless you explicitly tell it to go look for itself. Anything
> > that's causing the system to talk to a serial console is at the admin's
> > request. At this point in time, there is no way to force a change of
> > console once the system is up and running.
>
> Unfortunately experience tells us otherwise. If we boot with no VGA
> plugged in, we can't plug one in later and expect to see a console.
If this is what is actually happening (ie. you do not have -P in /
boot.config), then you have a video card which fails when there is no
monitor connected, and it is not at all reasonable to expect syscons to
probe/attach to this.
> It seems that FreeBSD 3.1+ scans for a console, and if it can't find kb
> / vga it switches to serial. The old machines all work fine as they are
> 3.0 or less.
This assumption is false.
> I know I can set the console device in /boot/loader.conf, but this leads
> to other problems (possibly a bug here): on some machines we get a
> "/boot/loader not found - Disk error 0x1", and we suspect that this is
> to do with the boot partition not being constrained to the first 1024
> cylinders.
That's probably true. You shouldn't do this.
> Anyway, to cut a long story short, I would prefer to simply do something
> in /etc/rc.local to force the console back to local kb/vga, or disable
> the serial console in the kernel itself... so my question is: what? Is
> there such a command/setting?
No. Under the circumstances you've described, it wouldn't help anyway,
since there's nothing that you can do at that point that won't fail in
the same fashion that the earlier syscons probe did.
There have been some changes in syscons in 4.0 which may make it more
generous in dealing with your video adapter, but if syscons is not
attaching to your vide hardware, or the keyboard controller in these
systems is failing with the switch turned off, there is nothing that can
be done about it on software.
--
\\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith
\\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself, \\ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
\\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime. \\ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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