agetty doesn't work on ttyS0 with ILO

[W Sanders_1]

I can't get agetty to work on ttyS0, it dies:

ttyS0: ioctl: Input/output error

Agetty works fine on our systems without ILOs. Is there a way to get the serial port to work on an DL380 G3 with ILO installed? Thanks,

[Sebastian Koehler]

Please check this advisory, maybe it will help.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=PSD_ES041112_CW01

[W Sanders_1]

Thanks for that tip - assuming the serial port has somehow received the ESC-SHIFT-9, I should see the ILO command line interface when I connect to the serial port, right?

Unfortunately, the port seems to be completely dead as seen from the terminal server end. Unless the cabling is incorrect; since the server is remote I will have to wait for someone to check by direct connection to a known-good PC and cable.

[W Sanders_1]

Well, I don't think the port has received ESC-SHIFT-9, I finally got a serial connection to the port - I see a brief burst of garbage characters at all possible baud rates. This is happening on identical two G3 DL380s.

Should I be seeing garbage characters if the ILO has taken control, like it would be trying to run some proprietary protocol, or would is be spewing out a formatted, BIOS-like screen or menu items? Is this serial port ILO stuff documented anywhere?

[Chakravarthi]

When you don't see the agetty process running, what does '/sbin/fuser
-uv /dev/ttyS0' say when run as root?

[W Sanders_1]

Fuser shows nothing using the port. This was a good question, but if another process was using the port, the ioctl would be returning EBUSY or at least something other than EIO, right?

We have made no progress.

[W Sanders_1]

After 3 weeks escalating this problem and having an HP field service tech onsite for an entire day, we were finally able to get the DB9 port to show up as COM2 (/dev/ttyS1) by adjusting EEPROM parameters:

- Select "embedded com port" in system options and change form COM1 to COM2.

- Disable the ILO in ILO (F8) configure menu.

- Change BIOS "serial console port / ems" from "Auto BSC enable" to "COM2".

Hard to believe we could not find any documentation, and bamboozled HP support for three weeks on what ought to be a common question about one of HP's most popular servers ever, but so it goes!

I still cannot get the system to come up through the serial port in single user mode, but agetty works, and I see the BIOS and Grub menu during boot.