FYI: console on serial port (Q&A)

[Niall Young]

On Mon, 31 Mar 2003, Frank Lenaerts wrote:

> I am using FAI by booting from a floppy disk to install a system; this
> means that, when the installation finishes, I have to remove the
> floppy disk and press enter to reboot the newly installed system. This

With the FAI BootCD I'm using Grub as a bootloader as it has a "fallback"
option.  It'll try to boot /dev/hda (IDE or SCSI, whatever the BIOS
presents as the first disk), and if this fails (partition is missing or
kernel not where it expects) it'll boot the CD.  You have to be careful
obviously, but it's very useful:

# Boot automatically after 4 secs.
timeout 4

# By default, boot the first entry.
default 0

# Fallback to the second entry.
fallback 1

title hd
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz

title cdrom
root (fd0) # El Torito floppy emulation
kernel /vmlinuz initrd=/boot/fai-bootcd-initrd.bin ramdisk_size=2048
root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc rw
initrd /boot/fai-bootcd-initrd.bin

title rescue
root (fd0)
kernel /vmlinuz initrd=/boot/fai-bootcd-initrd.bin ramdisk_size=2048
root=/dev/ram0 init=/bin/ash rw
initrd /boot/fai-bootcd-initrd.bin

Niall Young                                    Chime Communications Pty Ltd
niall at chime.net.au                            Level 6, 263 Adelaide Terrace
Ph: (+61) 08 9213 1330 / 0408 192 797         Perth, Western Australia 6000

    "Apologies, a long term solution has been found.  February will be
    extended to 30 days to bring it in line with other months."
                                        -- Jock Main, Feb 2003