I have been experimenting with an RS-232 null modem cable and am curious to know how one would allow FreeBSD to use a serial port as a terminal, like in the days of the PDP-11 where all users had dumb terminals connected to the computer via serial connections. I wish to do the same with a headless FreeBSD machine with a serial cable running to my main PC which is using PuTTY to communicate over the serial port. Before you ask why I don't use SSH for the same purpose, I prefer this type of connection because if the network were to go down I would still be able to log into the server and see what exactly is happening, whereas if the same situation occurred with SSH I would be mostly out of luck, if that makes any sense at all. I have seen other similar questions with answers pointing to screen
and minicom
but these seem to be for fulfilling the role of PuTTY on the BSD side, which is not what I want here. What I want is a serial port configured at a specific baud rate with getty
running on it, etc. as if it were an actual terminal.
To answer the question of what version of init
I am running, I am using FreeBSD 10.3, and I haven't changed anything at the system level so it's running the default BSD-style init
that uses rc scripts.
getty
processes is the responsibility of init. So to start with, tell us what version of init you're using./etc/ttys
. Have you got any confirmation that the serial driver is working?/etc/ttys
looked pretty clear to me. Have you tried it?