freebsd stable - Dec 2010 - how to access the SOL (Serial over Lan) port in FreeBSD ?

Hi,
i recently bought two motherboards with Intel AMT support,
a remote management tool which among other things implements
Serial Over Lan (SOL) -- which seems to be accessible
via TCP port 16994

I have enabled the feature in the bios and built a client
(amtterm, see http://dl.bytesex.org/releases/amtterm/ )
which does connect to the port, but there is no data.

Especially, on the FreeBSD side i see no "uart" device
associated with the SOL port, only uart0 which is the
physical serial port on board.

Any idea on how to make the SOL port visible ?
I am using a stock 8.2-beta kernel for amd64,
tried to load ipmi but it makes no difference.

cheers
luigi

On 15.12.2010 01:35, Luigi Rizzo wrote:
> i recently bought two motherboards with Intel AMT support,
> a remote management tool which among other things implements
> Serial Over Lan (SOL) -- which seems to be accessible
> via TCP port 16994
> 
> I have enabled the feature in the bios and built a client
> (amtterm, see http://dl.bytesex.org/releases/amtterm/ )
> which does connect to the port, but there is no data.
> 
> Especially, on the FreeBSD side i see no "uart" device
> associated with the SOL port, only uart0 which is the
> physical serial port on board.
> 
> Any idea on how to make the SOL port visible ?
> I am using a stock 8.2-beta kernel for amd64,
> tried to load ipmi but it makes no difference.
Today I successfully tested IPMI 2.0 card integrated within SuperMicro server.
For server side, I've got /dev/ttyu0 as first physical port,
/dev/ttyu1 as second and /dev/ttyu2 for SOL port automatically at boot time.

Open request for /dev/ttyu2 locks waiting for DCD
until I use ipmitool shell at remote workstation and command 'sol
activate' in the shell.
It gave me clean serial channel and I've successfully got getty login
prompt,
logged in, run Midnight Commander (TERM=xterm) without a problem.

Eugene Grosbein

Hi Luigi,
> i recently bought two motherboards with Intel AMT support,
> a remote management tool which among other things implements
> Serial Over Lan (SOL) -- which seems to be accessible
> via TCP port 16994
> I have enabled the feature in the bios and built a client
> (amtterm, see http://dl.bytesex.org/releases/amtterm/ )
> which does connect to the port, but there is no data.
> Especially, on the FreeBSD side i see no "uart" device
> associated with the SOL port, only uart0 which is the
> physical serial port on board.
> Any idea on how to make the SOL port visible ?
> I am using a stock 8.2-beta kernel for amd64,
> tried to load ipmi but it makes no difference.
I'm using Intel servers with Intel motherboards, they are IPMI-capable
and both LAN and SOL are implemented by bridging with onboard ethernet
and serial port. After loading IPMI driver and configuring IPMI using
ipmitool (/usr/ports/sysutils/ipmitool), SOL is accessible via
built-in ssh shell that listens on IPMI IP, or ipmitool running from
remote. No additional serial ports nor ethernet adapters are exposed
to the system, and you cannot connect to IPMI IP from local machine.

Cheers.

On Tue, 14 Dec 2010 20:35:50 +0100
Luigi Rizzo <rizzo@iet.unipi.it> wrote:
> i recently bought two motherboards with Intel AMT support,
> a remote management tool which among other things implements
> Serial Over Lan (SOL) -- which seems to be accessible
> via TCP port 16994
> 
> I have enabled the feature in the bios and built a client
And configured it?
See http://linux.die.net/man/7/amt-howto

I know nothing about AMT (yet), but it looks interesting.
HTH
-- 
Torfinn

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 09:39:31PM +0100, Torfinn Ingolfsen
wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Dec 2010 20:35:50 +0100
> Luigi Rizzo <rizzo@iet.unipi.it> wrote:
> 
> > i recently bought two motherboards with Intel AMT support,
> > a remote management tool which among other things implements
> > Serial Over Lan (SOL) -- which seems to be accessible
> > via TCP port 16994
> > 
> > I have enabled the feature in the bios and built a client
> 
> And configured it?
> See http://linux.die.net/man/7/amt-howto
yes, some of the other features do work (power and status, accessible
through the web on port 16992 or using amttool).
The terminal support is apparently enabled (amtterm does the
negotiation, and if i disable it then port 16994 is not accessible).

cheers
luigi