[lug] Help using Serial Console

[George Sexton]

I'm having some problems using a serial console, and wondered if anyone 
could give me some pointers. I've looked through the various HOWTO 
documents for serial consoles, and text consoles and I'm just not seeing 
what I need.

I've got 3 computers, and a router in a co-location facility, and I want 
to use the console server so I can do things like an fsck remotely. I've 
got an Avocent CPS1610 Console server connected to a machine running 
SUSE 10.2. I can see the machine POST, access setup, etc. I've got grub 
working on the serial port, and I can see the the serial console during 
machine boot.

I can also login using the serial port console. My "agetty" line from 
inittab is:

S0:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -h -L 38400 ttyS0 xterm

I'm using OpenSSH from another SUSE Linux 10.2 box to log in. $TERM on 
the client shows "xterm".

The problem I'm having is that the terminal behavior is erratic. I've 
tried specifying vt102, (nothing), and xterm on the agetty line. So far, 
xterm works the best but it still has problems. Some issues are:

1) # Columns seems fixed at 80, and not the width of the console window.
2) If I pull up VI, and the editor only gives me 24 lines of display. 
When I exit VI, and run a command that generates output, the lines of 
data scroll through the bottom ONE line of the console, rather than the 
whole console being refreshed as lines of data are scrolled up. Other 
programs like man, mc, and yast cause the same issue.

If I run "reset" after this problem, things are set back to more or less 
normal.

I'm using Konsole, but I've tried xterm as well. If I use putty, then I 
don't have to run RESET after using mc, man, etc, but they still only 
display in 80*24.

I've had pretty much the same kinds of issues using MINICOM as well. 
With minicom, or ssh and VT102, the terminal is limited to 80*24 unless 
I resize the window. If I resize the window, then the number of lines is 
used. "reset" has no effect with minicom.

If anyone could give me some tips on improving this, I would REALLY 
appreciate it.





-- 
George Sexton
MH Software, Inc.
Voice: +1 303 438 9585
URL:   http://www.mhsoftware.com/