2010-05-11

Connecting to Sun Netra T1's serial console from an Asus wl500g Permium router

I've bought a Sun Netra T1 machine on an auction recently. Unfortunately none of my PCs at home have serial ports so I had to postpone to play with this newcomer.



It seemed to be a great idea to connect this box to my Asus wl500g router which executes OpenWrt instead of the defalt firmware. I was suggested buying an ATEN serial/USB converter which was built using the PL2303 chipset and belived to be able to work with Linux, but I ventured to buy a HQCC-146 instead at the expense of the fact that it may not be recognized by OpenWrt. HQCC-146 was cheaper and it's available in almost every Auchan hypermarket.

Setting up OpenWrt was very easy only the corresponding kernel module, minicom and ser2net needed to be installed.

# ipkg install kmod-usb-serial-pl2303
# ipkg install minicom
# ipkg install ser2net

Right after attaching the converter to the router box it has been discovered immediately.

# dmesg | tail -5
usbserial.c: USB Serial support registered for PL-2303
pl2303.c: Prolific PL2303 USB to serial adaptor driver v0.10.1
hub.c: new USB device 01:03.0-2, assigned address 2
usbserial.c: PL-2303 converter detected
usbserial.c: PL-2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0 (or usb/tts/0 for devfs)

I've configured ser2net, but it doesn't seem to be as convenient as minicom.

# cp /etc/ser2net.conf /etc/ser2net.conf.orig
# egrep -v '^#|^$' /etc/ser2net.conf
BANNER:netra:Welcome to SUN Netra T1 TCP port \p device \d\r\n
2001:raw:600:/dev/usb/tts/0:9600 NONE 1STOPBIT 8DATABITS XONXOFF LOCAL -RTSCTS netra

Minicom was able to connect to my netra after a little configuration.

# cat > /etc/minirc.netra <<EOF
pu port /dev/usb/tts/0
pu baudrate 9600
pu bits 8
pu parity N
pu stopbits 1
EOF


# minicom netra
Welcome to minicom 2.2-rc2

OPTIONS:
Compiled on Sep 30 2007, 06:39:46.
Port /dev/usb/tts/0

Press CTRL-A Z for help on special keys

lom>poweron
LOM event: power on
.
Netra t1 (UltraSPARC-IIi 440MHz), No Keyboard
OpenBoot 3.10.27 ME, 1024 MB memory installed, Serial #16382248.
Ethernet address 8:0:20:f9:f9:28, Host ID: 80f9f928.

Boot device: disk0 File and args:
:217: The file just loaded does not appear to be executable.
ok power-off


Cool, isn't it.

2 comments:

carsten said...

Hey,

I also have a SUN Netra t1 and tried your configuraion. I try to connect from an normal PC using a USB/RS232 adapter like you with a RJ45/serial cable.

I can connect to the SUN with minicom and telnet, but i never was able to make any input with my keyboard at the 'lom>' prompt.

Does anybody have any ideas?

LCSONTOS said...

Hi,

I'm really sorry, but I've just realized your comment.

Alas, I haven't the vaguest idea by exactly what your problem might be caused. But I think it should be some kind of configuration issue. I used to connect to my Netra using both minicom and gnome serial console without any issues.