Is anyone here familiar with getting Unraid to redirect console output using SOL (serial-over-lan)?  I built my system awhile back with an Asrock E3C224-4L mobo with the hopes that the included IPMI would make it easier to maintain as a headless setup.  Recently I finally got the IPMI to work however this mobo was designed to use Java applets as a means to view that console output and those frankly have been a nightmare to try to get working on a modern desktop without tripping over a myriad of security issues.

 

Along the way I stumbled across an alternative approach by using ipmitool and SOL to view that output: https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/how-to-use-ipmitool-sol-with-asrock-motherboards-alternative-to-jviewer.51/

 

So far it has been working great however at the moment I am only seeing the bios side of things, meaning that if I boot the server while viewing the redirected output using SOL/ipmitool then I only see the bios related messaging and the boot menu options.  Once the boot countdown starts and Unraid boots then there is no further output that I can see.

 

I have been combing through the forums and unfortunately I have not found much on this topic.  The best I could find is one thread that discusses something similar albeit using a locally connected null modem cable: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/61027-guide-how-to-access-your-unraid-console-via-a-serial-port/

 

This thread also has some overlap: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/26551-supermicro-ipmi-view-and-ikvm-setup-blank-kvm-terminal-solution/#comment-244508

 

Between these two threads I have tried various combinations of appending " ... respawn:/sbin/agetty -L ttyS0 ... " or " ... respawn:/sbin/agetty -L ttyS1 ... " to /etc/inittab however nothing seems to have changed.  Any help here would be much appreciated.

 

For reference here is the out output for dmesg | grep tty:

[    0.142976] printk: console [tty0] enabled
[    0.433035] 00:07: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4, base_baud = 115200) is a 16550A

 

It appears that the SOL console redirection settings on my motherboard mention a COM1 and a COM2.  My understanding is that COM1 is meant more for a locally connected serial cable while COM2 is meant more for SOL redirection.  COM2 is what I currently have enabled and it allows me to view the bios messaging on boot up.  What confuses me however is how COM1 and COM2 are supposed to correlate to ttySO and ttyS1 in Unraid.  What I have read so far suggests that the dmesg output should be mentioning a ttyS1 but I am not seeing it.... 

 

 

Edited January 30, 20233 yr by misterbeetz

In the meantime I found another option which is by using a docker container to run the IPMI Java viewer applet.  With this approach one can avoid mucking up their own desktop in order to get this abomination to work.  A preconfigured docker for this task already exists and I was able to confirm that it works for my setup: https://github.com/solarkennedy/ipmi-kvm-docker

 

In this instance the console output is complete, meaning that I can see all the messages that Unraid produces during startup which is useful for troubleshooting a hung (and headless) system:

 

 

Now this makes me wonder why the SOL (serial-over-lan) approach only shows up to the boot menu options and stops once Unraid starts the boot process... :

 

 

 

Maybe someone will be able to point out what I am missing here.  The SOL approach is much faster and cleaner so it would be nice to use that method instead of relying on docker containers and abandoned Java applets...