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A comment on Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer.

Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by tyingq on Friday February 01, 2019 @10:30AM (#19054862)
Love articles like this, and there's lots of good info here but...

"So, how do you get around installing an operating system on a computer which has no video output nor console redirection? For Windows and most Linux distros, you can’t"

Uh, no.

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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by paulfurtado on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:46AM (#19055727)
For most of these, changing syslinux.cfg in the install media lets you add the console=ttyS0 option to the kernel command line and whatever option triggers the text installer for the distro. So it isn't too hard to do, albeit annoyingly non default.
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by upofadown on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:33AM (#19055563)
The examples listed require the existence of a keyboard and screen. You would have to make or find a distro that used the serial console at boot. I think the whole point that the author was trying to make is that OpenBSD supports a serial console by default with the regular installation image.
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by tyingq on Friday February 01, 2019 @12:21PM (#19056126)
They don't generally require anything special though. Maybe a parameter or two. He installed OpenBSD on a serial console. Here's someone installing Debian on a serial console: https://teklager.se/en/knowledge-base/installing-debian-over...
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by LukeShu on Friday February 01, 2019 @09:54PM (#19060715)
The Linux kernel itself will use the serial console by default if there's no VGA device:

    If no console device is specified, the first device found capable of
    acting as a system console will be used. At this time, the system
    first looks for a VGA card and then for a serial port. So if you don't
    have a VGA card in your system the first serial port will automatically
    become the console.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/admin-guide/serial-...
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by ohithereyou on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:47AM (#19055733)
You only need a keyboard and mouse unless you modify the boot media to use the serial console for the installer, which several of those links detail. To say that Linux doesn't support it is incredibly ignorant of the author.
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by yellowapple on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:37AM (#19055612)
IIRC Slackware at least also supports a serial console by default when installing (I used it to install Slackware on an Iomega NAS an old coworker of mine got rid of). Not sure about other distros.
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by Fnoord on Friday February 01, 2019 @11:02AM (#19055172)
Many NICs support PXE. You use bootp and TFTP to start a Linux installation. I've installed Linux on SPARC and Alpha this way (the MIPS machines had a form of video out), as well as on a Soekris.
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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by sazfedjhrgnukc on Friday February 01, 2019 @06:02PM (#19059627)
"Uh, no."

Uh, yes.

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Re:Revive a Cisco IDS into a Capable OpenBSD Computer by tyingq on Friday February 01, 2019 @06:27PM (#19059783)
No, really.

One example: https://teklager.se/en/knowledge-base/installing-debian-over...

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