[rescue] intel wasteful?

[Chris Hedemark]

On Mon, 2002-06-24 at 20:35, George Adkins wrote:

> Hmm, I've never met a PeeCee board that didn't either fail post with bad 
> beep-codes, or just sit there and do nothing if it had no video.  But then 
> again, I've only been playing with PeeCees since the mid Eighties or so.
> Any particular brand or model you recommend for Headless use?

They aren't all capable of this behavior, but many are.  Some of them
will still beep an error code but then go ahead and boot the OS anyway.

I always roll my own PC's for home use.  For $client use I never have to
deal with headless boxen because the KVM's are plentiful.

> Hmm, I wasn't aware that the OpenBSD install kernel would re-direct console 
> output to serial port on x86 either.  

Yes, so will linux.  When you build the tape you have to flag a kernel
option to use the right tty as console.

> I guess I'll have to do some research.  
> Is this the install kernel or a Debug-enabled kernel compiled special with 
> serial console redirect support?  Which OpenBSD? 2.6? 3.0?

You don't have to recompile.  But you do have to boot the kernel with a
flag for serial console.  I've done it with Linux but not yet with
OpenBSD (I'm pretty sure that's there too).

> How did you get the PeeCee BIOS to read a boot block from Tape?

PeeCee BIOS never sees the tape.  At best it knows to boot from SCSI
device.  It's up to the SCSI controller to boot the right device.

> Or are you using a Bootstrap Floppy?

Usually I do but it is not necessary.

> is it SCSI? Which host adapter? (I'm unaware of any PeeCee SCSI host adapters 
> that support booting from tape directly) 
> 
> Details, Please... This is all rather... Nebulous.

Hey now be patient.  I'm going to be away until after the Independence
Day holiday so at the very best I won't be able to log specifics until
then.  I haven't had to boot a headless PC in about 8 or 9 years so I
want to re-do it to get all of the details right so you can try too.