I have configured a number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux V4 machines so the console port can be remotely accessed through ilO by using SSH and VSP. The good news is that this is all working.
The bad news is that there are two problems.
1/ The grub.conf menu is unreadable. grub uses some basic escape sequences to format the text. This corrupts the VSP screen making it unreadable. Once grub times out the boot process process displays correctly. The documentation states that VSP uses vt320 terminal emulation. I have configured Linux as per the iLO VSP HOWTO. Why is it then that VSP has problems with the grub boot screen?
2/ Logging into Linux and managing the machine using VSP works pretty well. I have noticed however that when there is a large amount of output going to the screen that some output is lost. Does VSP have any form of flow control? Is there any way to correct this?
The iLO Remote Serial Console (RSC) applet uses VT320 emulation. However, you are accessing the virtual serial port (VSP) using SSH, and not RSC, the emulation needs to be consistent between your SSH client and the host.
The VSP does offer flow control between the iLO procesor and the host OS. You may need to enable this with the right agetty commands. Check your configuration. Note that you probably want to avoid flow control for the kernel so that ctrl-S does not pause the wrong process.
I've looked at this some more and have isolated the problem. The two problems listed above only occur with iLO firmware V1.89. If I downgrade the iLO firmware to V1.84 or earlier then everything works just fine.
Hopefully these problems will be fixed in the next version of the iLO firmware.
