[syslinux] pxelinux multiple serial port setting

Kimitoshi Takahashi ktaka at clustcom.com
Tue Mar 2 23:03:09 PST 2010


Hi Shao,

> Is it possible to configure your serial-over-LAN in these new computers' 
> BIOS?  Perhaps you can ask the vendor to ship them preconfigured for the 
> same serial port as your old computers as part of your expectations as a 
> bulk consumer (assuming you are one).

It isn't possible to change which serial port should go to serial-over-LAN channel in the new computers' BIOS(Supermicro X8SIE).
I asked Supermicro through sales rep. about that. 
Unfortunately, the answer was "I am sorry to tell you that it is fixed by hardware, so we can not change it
to COM2 by software update.".
 
> Other than that, PXELINUX searches for its config-file using a 
> well-known "count-down" method, which includes searching for a file 
> based on UUID, on MAC address, and on IP address.  Could you 
> special-case these newer computers and provide a PXELINUX config-file 
> for them which uses COM3?

Yes, we can make per-host base configs. 
Actually, we can provide pxelinux.configfile option for the newer machines based on the first 4 byte of the MAC address, with no problem.
But it's ad hoc method, because we are not sure what range of the MAC adresss are the same type of hardware even within the same vendor, until the exception comes.
We'd rather have the pxelinux which support mulitiple serial port or the one which decides output device on the fly.

Kimitoshi Takahashi




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