On Mon, 14 Apr 1997, Armen Babikyan wrote:

> >On Mon, 14 Apr 1997 21:37:21 -0500,
> >Albert Carter <SilverMoonTiger@wizzard.tiac.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> Yes I have a FPU 68882 NUBUS adapter card.  IIsi is 68030 20 MHz BTW
> >
> >Oops, here goes my rusty memory again.
> >
> >> >What if you hook up a serial terminal to the modem or printer port
> >> >(tty00 or tty01, respectively), run getty on it to log in on it,
> >> >and try to login on the serial port?  It probably is very heavy
> >> >if what I think is happening is indeed happening, but you should
> >> >be able to at least login and see what's going on.
> >>
> >> Where would I get a serial console?  Anyway to hook it up so the printer
> >> monitors it?
> >
> >No, I didn't say serial "console".  I said a serial "terminal",
> >meaning you don't get the boot messages on it but you can log in on
> >it.  And what I suggest is that you plug in a terminal (or another
> >computer running terminal emulator) to your serial port so that you
> >can type your login name and password to get into the system to see
> >what's going on (by ps command, etc).
> >
> >As for the places, I don't know of any.  Sorry.
> >
> >> You never said wether I should boot in single user mode and run fsck or
> >> not.  Should I or shouldn't I?
> >
> >AFAICT, there's no reason you shouldn't.  OTOH, it's always safer if
> >you do.
> >
> >Ken
> 
> yes, this whole thing works and is a good idea to install unless you have a

I'm sure it does and I certainly will use it if needed (I have another 
machine (Linux), a modem cable and a null-modem cable to do it) but not 
everybody has a serial console or even a second machine with a cable.

Isn't there a way to switch between the console and X? Under Linux you 
just hit cntr-alt-Fn where n is the number of the virtual console you 
want to go to and your screen flashes and it does it, just like in dt 
except X is added to the list of things you can switch to. It's very 
convenient.

Dont get me wrong, I prefer NetBSD. An more importantly, I dont want 
people to start arguing about different features in one or the other. I 
just happened to have enjoyed this feature and since other people seem to 
want it, was wondering if it was available (or easy to add).

I tend to agree with the people who said a while back on this list that 
it's better to keep dt out of the kernel so maybe this could be handled 
by dt and require no system intervention. But then again I dont anything 
about dt internals.

> printer connected. i use a 9600bps getty on my tty01 in case my console
> software crashes (i.e. dt or x11r6). this reduces the number of time my mac
> has actually "crashed" to about 2. (once when i attempted to mount the
> driver partition on my MacOS hard drive, and once when i tried deleting a
> file in /lost+found) but the rest of the time, i've been hooked up to the
> net, so i telnet and login, or if i'm not, i run a printer cable into the
> printer port of both my macs and use zterm and log in.
> btw, netbsd getty can't handle data more than 9600bps, so don't try -
> you'll get tons of errors.
>   - a
> 
> 
> 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Because user errors often produce unpredictable results, the user
should try to avoid them."

IBM MVS/XA System Programming Library.