Talk:Enable Serial Console on Boot

Obsolete?

Is this information obsolete? The last susbtantive edit was in 20 October 2010 and the page says it applies to Alpine 1.10.x. I'm not sure what a "serial console" is---different from a normal tty? In practice when are they used? -- Dubiousjim 10:01, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

This still works fine with Alpine 2.3.6. It's used in practice if a KVM is not available for a given server/router running Alpine. In that case, connecting a set of Alpine boxes and other devices (such as switches or routers) to a serial console server can be a practical way to maintain console access.

Jbilyk 22:45, 13 April 2012 (EST)

This all still works as of 2022 with Alpine 3.16. In fact, the current generation of "virt" ISOs from the download page ship with the serial configuration enabled by default, so you can just boot them and log in over serial and everything works.

Yjftsjthsd-a (talk) 02:56, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

Still works fine as of Alpine 3.18.3

zcrayfish (talk) 03:05, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

inittab

If someone has more insight to serial & extlinux magic: What I'd love to have is something similar to the way AIX or Oracle VM had it: At bootloader time, issue a "press a key to activate this console" on vga and serial. Whatever is then used, gets the menu, and will then be the kernel console.

Darkfader (talk) 13:12, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

This can be configured in /etc/inittab

Any tty you want to be activated via keypress instead of always active, change 2nd column which says "respawn" to "askfirst".

A bit more documentation for this can be found at:

https://github.com/brgl/busybox/blob/master/examples/inittab

https://github.com/brgl/busybox/blob/master/init/init.c

zcrayfish (talk) 03:09, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

xen

we also need to extend it to reflect xen console stuff, so one sees the xen boot and also gets dom0 on the right tty. I'll add it if I manage to configure it ;)) Darkfader (talk) 13:50, 24 November 2012 (UTC)