iLo port Terminal Emulation

[Daniel Malcor]

I find the REMCONS feature in every version of iLo to be one slight step above useless.

I have attached a "script" capture of a reboot session. There are few real "lines" and a HUGE amount of VT100 cursor positioning commands.

Is there a way to stop it from over controling the screen? Is there some tool to allow be to review the attached screen capture?

This is our only way to check for problems during a boot, and we just cannot see what is happening (the "OK" and "Failed" messages are all jumbled).

Thanks

:-Dan

We are using HP DL380 G3 boxes with RedHat ES 3

[Gopi Sekar]

try with 'less -r file-name' this will convert control characters in to display and present you screen in the same manner as you see in console

to revert back just type -r in the less prompt.

just to give you warning, screen navigation(moving up and down) may not be so smooth, because of control characters.

Regards,
Gopi

[David Claypool]

Check out the following doc on the iLO virtual serial port: http://h200001.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00263709/c00263709.pdf

[Daniel Malcor]

I agree the VSP is the way to go. REMCONS is one step up from useless.

We have found this document very helpful, but not 100%:
Integrated Lights-Out Virtual Serial Port configuration and operation
http://h200001.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00263709/c00263709.pdf

Hardware Platforms under discussion:

Works on: HP ProLiant DL380 G4 server
Fails on: HP ProLiant DL380 G3 server

We have learned much and fixed everything nice on our G4 machines, but the G3 boxes run in "fixed I/O mode" with the Virtual Serial Port address set to 0x0408.

We can use "setserial" to fix this once the system has booted, but that does not change what the kernel thinks the serial port is:

HappyG4system# dmesg | egrep -i "serial|tty"
Serial driver version 5.05c (2001-07-08) with MANY_PORTS MULTIPORT SHARE_IRQ SERIAL_PCI ISAPNP enabled
ttyS0 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
ttyS1 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A

SadG3system# dmesg | egrep -i "serial|tty"
Serial driver version 5.05c (2001-07-08) with MANY_PORTS MULTIPORT SHARE_IRQ SERIAL_PCI ISAPNP enabled
ttyS0 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
^^^^^^- Wrong!

The final question is how do we tell the kernel to look for the 0x0408

[Daniel Malcor]

The "less -r filename" is an interesting idea, but really not much better than "cat"ing it to the screen.

Try it yourself, I attached the original screen capture.

The sort of solution I'm looking for is something that will process the vt100 screen positioning codes and allow be a simple flat file of what happened during the boot.
Failing that just the ability to page thru the screen shots and see what was "OK" and what "Failed".

I had hopes for dmesg and /var/log/boot.log, but they don't tell me the same things.

I guess a simple statment of my problem is that I what to know what happened during the last boot, and I cannot seem to find that (something like the HP-UX /etc/rc.log).

:-Dan

[Gopi Sekar]

There are few questions you had asked, let me try to answer them:

1. If you want to change the IO address of serial device(ttyS0) you can do so using setserial command. check 'man setserial' for more information.
eg: setserial /dev/ttyS0 port 0x0408 irq 3 uart 16550A

2. Ofcourse output of less -r is not nice for scrolling and paging. you can try 'more' command which by default coverts vt100 characters, navigation is by enter.

3. I got to know from your file that you are using script command to capture the screen. script has option called -t which will capture the output timing also, this file can then be parsed through 'replay' command (check ur distribution if not available then install it) which will playback the script in real time which can be paused by scroll lock.

eg: script -t 2> timingfile
# -t option outputs timing info on std err so 2>
# script capture will be in the name typescript, now play back the file in this method
replay timingfile
# it checks for file name typescript and plays them with this timing info, which can be paused any time using scroll lock

Hope this helps,
Gopi