On Mon, 29 Jul 2002, Dima Veselov wrote:

> I've newly installed 1.5.3 on PC box. During installation I have chosen
> "Serial bootblocks", because console should be serial.
>
> To problems: the first, when NetBSD boots up keyboard hangs. After booting
> getty tries to open it, I see login message, but I can't log in, because
> keyboard is not responding!
>
> During booting on the serial console I see that keyboard is found.
> As I think it is a bug in loader or kernel which turns keyboard off.
> Resetting keyboard doesn't helps - keyboard is alive, but NetBSD doesn't
> react on it.
> After booting on serial console I see "getty: device ttyE0 is not configured"

"ttyE0" isn't configured, because a machine with a serial console
isn't necessarily expected to have a keyboard and monitor. The getty
thing is the problem -- it means that the installer didn't update
"/etc/ttys" for the serial console.

> Second problem is about serial console: after booting there is no login
> message, so I can't login to system in any way at all!

First, grab the boot on the serial console by hitting the space bar
as soon as the boot message is displayed. Then boot single-user, by
giving a "-s", like this:

	boot wd0a:netbsd -s

Now "getty" doesn't get a chance to come into play; "init" will just
open a shell on the console. So now you may "fsck" and mount all
partitions (and may as well add swap, while you're at it),

	swapctl -A
	fsck
	mount -a

and now you can use "vi" to edit files in "/etc". Mainly, you'll want
to edit "/etc/ttys" to turn "tty00" on. Alternatively, you could turn
"console" on ("console" means "whichever device is the console. Wonder
why that isn't the default?). To make the keyboard and monitor logins
work with a serial console active, uncomment the lines for "screen 0"
and "keyboard" in "/etc/wscons.conf", and add "wscons=YES" to
"/etc/rc.conf". (A template of possible settings for "/etc/rc.conf"
is in "/etc/defaults/rc.conf", from which it is convenient to copy
and paste.)

Now if you hit Ctl-D, "init" will continue to boot multi-user, and you
subsequently should be able to login on both the serial console and
the keyboard.

Frederick