Serial Console

[Jim Morris <Jim Morris net>]

Hi all,

I have been trying to get the serial console feature to work on my
Redhat 6.0 system, with little luck.   I've successfully built a
kernel with the serial console option enabled, and at boot time, I
successfully get all the kernel output in a minicom session in a
terminal attached to ttyS1.

The problem comes when trying to enable logins on the serial console.
I've added the following to /etc/inittab:

# Serial console
s1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mgetty -r -s 9600 -x 3 ttyS1

After doing a "kill -HUP 1" to restart the init process (or
rebooting), I now get a login prompt on the serial console as follows:

----------------------------------
Red Hat Linux release 6.0 (Hedwig)
Kernel 2.2.11 on an i586


vortex.morris.net login: jim
----------------------------------

The problem is as you might notice above. mgetty takes the username,
and then invokes "login".  However, and this seems to be the BIG
problem:  login never presents a password prompt on the serial
terminal.

The process list shows login running after typing the username and
pressing return.  This login process is definitely invoked from the
terminal - and the mgetty for the terminal has exited to at this point:

root      6101  0.0  0.6  1320  408 ?        S    08:22   0:00 login


What's funny about all this is that I have mgetty setup to allow dial
in on my modem, as follows:

# Serial Dialup lines
s2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mgetty -s 115200 -x 1 ttyS2

This works - and if I dial into the modem on the 3rd serial port,
everything works as expected.  It simply appears that for some unknown
reason, login doesn't want to run over my NULL modem cable connection
to a second PC.

Thanks for any advice!

 --
The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
 --
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