[ On Tuesday, June 20, 2000 at 18:49:32 (-0700), John Nemeth wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: SUPPORT_SERIAL=?
>
>      As other people have said, this can also be tricky to get right on
> a PC.  I installed FreeBSD on one box, which had an IBM 3278 style
> keyboard attached to it (i.e. the keys and layout were very similar to
> what you would find on an IBM 3278 terminal, but it was designed for
> use with PC's).  Anyways, there must have been something quirky about
> the keyboard, since the bootblocks didn't detect it, and they
> automatically switched to serial console mode.  The only output I saw
> was a "version" line, after which the drive kept whirring but I wasn't
> able to do anything.  Since I had never installed FreeBSD before, this
> required a bit of head scratching before I figured out that I should
> replace the keyboard.  If an auto switching scheme is implemented, it
> should print a message indicating that it is switching to serial
> console mode, as a safety precautiion against this situation.

Yes that's a bit of a pain....

The modified boot blocks I wrote for 1.3.3 printed "CONSOLE=COM0" on the
video display if they switch over, and I had optional code that could be
used in a switch-box environment that would print "CONSOLE=KBD" on the
serial port if you wanted to default to a serial console but allow for
the use of a keyboard switch box (or manually attached keyboard) for
those times when you need to frob the BIOS settings.

With FreeBSD's multi-stage boot you can now control the default console
through flags stored in a configuration file in the root directory.
Patching such flags right into /boot would be OK too, but obviously not
quite as user-friendly.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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