There are a number of steps needed to properly enable a serial console on Linux. You have to make sure that the kernel uses it for logging, make sure a getty runs on it, make sure that kudzu doesn’t mess with your terminal, and finally make sure that root logins are allowed on it. To make these steps simpler, I have written a script to perform all the steps automatically. This script was written and tested on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL4) but it could easily be modified for other Linux distributions.


Activate Serial Console script
(download script here: ActivateSerialConsole.tar)

#!/bin/bash
#
# ActivateSerialConsole - a script for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
#
 
# See if ttyS0 is already present in grub, if it is not there,
# then add it to the kernel command line.
fgrep -q ttyS0 /boot/grub/grub.conf
if [ $? != 0 ] ; then
    echo Modifying grub.conf...
    sed -i-ORIGINAL 's/^.*vmlinuz.*$/& console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200/g' /boot/grub/grub.conf
fi
 
# Check kudzu for the SAFE entry, add it if its not there already.
fgrep -q SAFE=yes /etc/sysconfig/kudzu
if [ $? != 0 ] ; then
    echo Modifying kudzu...
    echo SAFE=yes >> /etc/sysconfig/kudzu
fi
 
# Make sure we start a getty on ttyS0
fgrep -q ttyS0 /etc/inittab
if [ $? != 0 ] ; then
 
    echo Modifying inittab...
 
    cat >> /etc/inittab << END_OF_TEXT
 
# Serial Console
S0:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty ttyS0 115200 vt100
END_OF_TEXT
 
    kill -HUP 1
fi
 
# Make sure that ttyS0 is added to securetty so we can login as root
fgrep -q ttyS0 /etc/securetty
if [ $? != 0 ] ; then
    echo Modifying securetty...
    echo ttyS0 >> /etc/securetty
fi