How To get a serial dumb terminal working with upstart.

[bigfox]

I got my Wyse dumb terminal working with Ubuntu 7.04 using upstart.

In the directory /etc/event.d
Create the file ttyS0 containing the fallowing text:

# ttyS0 - getty
#
# This service maintains a getty on ttyS0 from the point the system is
# started until it is shut down again.

start on runlevel 2
start on runlevel 3
start on runlevel 4
start on runlevel 5
start on stopped ttyS0

stop on shutdown

respawn
exec /sbin/getty 19200 ttyS0 vt100

ttyS0 is COM 1
ttyS1 is COM 2
etc..
Change as necessary for your system.

The part "start on stopped ttyS0" restarts the process if it crashes or exits. I was having trouble getting it to come back up after logging out on the dumb terminal or if a program run on the terminal crashed. This solves that problem.

[jelabarre]

But now that things have gotten moved around in Karmic, grub has become grub2, etc, what has to change in these instructions? I have been able to get karmic-server-alpha6 to show me boot messages over the serial connection, but I cannot get Grub2 to show on serial, nor can I log in to a serial terminal once the system has booted.

I'm looking for this as a failover for a headless system, in case of network issues where SSH would not be an option.