[Summary] Adding serial console after poweron

Thanks to Paul LaMadeleine, Stephen Wolthusen, David Harrington, Bertrand
Hutin, Matthew Stier, and Bill Voight.

The general concensus is that the systems should have the eeprom updated to
use the serial port (ttya) for the console, shut the systems down, unplug
the keyboard, hook up the terminal server and reboot.

Paul gave this bit of other info...
***snip***
We use the console server 3200 here exclusively.  It works great.  You
should be able to connect the lightwave to the serial port now with out an
issue.  You should not have to reboot the server to get the system to use
the serial port as the console.  You just need to start up the terminal
service in the inittab I believe.  Our lines look like this:

[this will all go on one line....]
co:234:respawn:/usr/lib/saf/ttymon -g -h -p "`uname -n` console login: " -T
sun -d /dev/console -l console -m ldterm,ttcompat
[end of what would be on one line...]

You may have to stop the current console.  However, you will need to change
the boot environment variable, which you should be able to do using eeprom.

There is a command 'consadm' that looks like it will do some of this for
you, but I have never used it.
***snip***

Dave said that from his experience, the terminal server should not be
attached while the server is up and running.

Without changing the console to the serial port, Stephen mentioned "by
default you will get a TTY on a serial port" if the terminal server is
attached but the console is not set to go to the serial port.

There was mention of concern about this terminal server sending a break
signal, but the documentation states that "a break will not be sent to the
servers at any time unless specified by the user."  I think I won't trust
this in a production environment.  ;)

Thanks to everyone for their input.

Original Query:
I would like to add a terminal server to our systems via the serial port.
Currently we have keyboards on all the systems (and a few floating monitors
to be connected as needed).

My question is, if I attach the terminal server (a Lightwave Communications
Console Server 3230) now, do the systems need to be rebooted in order to use
the terminal server to access them?

Also, when the systems are rebooted, the keyboard must be unplugged,
correct?

Thanks in advance.

Kevin Colagio
Global eBusiness Processing Center
Site Phone: 585-758-1538
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