January 2010 - connecting the virtual serial
port of a vmware machine to a terminal
I've got an iso-image of a more or less embedded
system, which i wanted to get up and runnung on my Apple Mac VMWare
Fusion. When the OS on this image is started in Fusion, it immediately
switched console output to the serial port. The challenge was to
connect the VMWare Fusion emulated serial port to some terminal program
to be able to "install" the image inside VMWare Fusion.
When Fusion installs a serial port, it wants to get a filename where to
store output. I tried to connect this to a tty/pty or a named pipe,
this did not work at all because VMWare overwrites anything generated
by "hand".
OK, so i tried to find information about the possibilities of
configuring the VMWare serial port by editing the .vmx file - the
contents of this file are not documented by VMWare (this is really a
mess, Mr. Vmware !!) but this Link
(http://sanbarrow.com/vmx.html) has the required information. The
.vmx file of the virtual machine has to be edited , the file type
of the serial0 port has to be changed from "file" to "pipe".
The next part of the solution was a utility named socat http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/
which allows to connect the socket created by VMWare Fusion to a pty by
issuing the command
socat unix-connect:"Virtual
Machines.localized/com1" pty,link=/tmp/com1-pty
After starting the virtual machine, i'm now able to start my favorite
terminal program (kermit) in another iterm window and use /tmp/com1-pty
for the serial port.
November 2009 - asterisk
+ avm b1/c2/c4 + chan_capi on FreeBSD 7.2
I've had a hard time upgrading my old
hacked-together and never quite satisfying working asterisk1.2
installation to FreeBSD 7.2 and Asterisk 1.4. To make a long
story short: it works now, asterisk 1.4 from the ports, C4B from Thomas
Wintergerst, liblinuxcapi and chan_capi from the net and an AVM C2
active ISDN card. Works. Stable.
From the result i have made a kit, it is available from here,
enjoy and have fun!
September 2009 - getting ipv6 up and running
After
reading Benedikt
Stockebrand's (highly recommended) book, i have started (a month or
so
ago) to establish an IPv6 tunnel to the Internet - which runs smoothly
in the meantime
-
and have begun to convert my complete home-lab network to IPv6.
Currently i'm running a mixed environment (i.e. testing the new squid
3.1 IPv6 enabled web-proxy).
For test
purposes kts.org is now reachable in IPv6 space as http://www.ipv6.kts.org
April
2009 - getting Debian
Linux onto an HP9000/D380
Installing Debian 5.0.1 onto a HPPA PA-RISC HP9000/D380. Works fine,
but after the installation, there is no login prompt on the console, so
there is no access to the box. The solution is to get a shell right as
the last step in the installer and modify /target/etc/inittab so the
line:
#T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty
-L ttyS0 9600 vt100
is changed to:
T0:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty
-L ttyB0 9600 vt100
In words, remove the # at the beginning of the line and change ttyS0 to
ttyB0.
Serial port assignments: access port / console port = /dev/ttyB0,
serial port 2 = /dev/ttyS0
Accessing port ttyB1 immediately hangs machine, cause currently unknown
...
Since there is no graphics console, comment out gettys for tty1... tty6
in /etc/inittab
February
2009
Due to demand, released a new version of setnetparm for
contemporary FreeBSD versions.
November
2008
Bought a Mac. I got so tired of the yearly updating to the
current FreeBSD version and the troubles going with it, that i finally
wanted to have a platform where everything worked out of the box. And
it does. And the best: below all this i've got my beloved BSD ...
January 2006
It was time to make nifmon run again under FreeBSD 7.0: nifmon-1.6.tar.gz
December 2005
Fiddling with the USB driver in FreeBSD, making my shiny new Microsoft
Wireless Notebokk Mouse running. You'll find the patch at PR90162
June 2004
Together with some other nice people we founded our own company secion GmbH
January 2004
After more than 20 years working for my former employer i have started
my own company on
January 1, 2004.
December 2003
Setting up a courier imap server to consolidate my mail accesses.
Fighting with mod_ssl for apache and certificates.
October 2003
Trying to get my HP9000/K220 working with OpenBSD 3.4-current. Docs and
patches to get it working can be found here.
March 2003
Worked on the freevrrpd
daemon. Added, corrected and updated manual pages and adding
functionality. Patches can be found here.
February 2003
Playing with an USB camera and the vid
port. Enhanced image quality by enabling some more "hidden" features of
the chipset. Patches can be found here. |