Serial console output and login

Hello,

I have installed RancherOS on a mini server hardware (apu board) without a monitor. So it would be great to use a serial console cable with a password login to maintain the RancherOS instance.

Is it possible or planned as feature? Would love to see it in the near future because of my special server hardware and a vmware instance of RancherOS :wink:

Regards

@pwFoo Did you find a way to get this working? I have been trying to get it booting on a Soekris box. I can see it load the ISO, but then it disappears.

Boot iso from usb stick or usb cdrom fails, but ipxe works. After booting I usw SSH login and RancherOS is running very stable. If OS is broken (by updating to a unstable dev… :wink: ) I just ipxe boot a stable one and reinstall / repair it.

Haven’t tested console or bricked my RancherOS in the near past…
If you’re booting from iso / ipxe you could set rancher.password=myPassword and console=ttyS0,115200 to the kernel line.

It will mount your previous installed disk by label. You can disable this with rancher.state=none.

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Hello pwFoo,

Thanks for the response and sorry for the late reply. I had found a temp solution, but now the console issue is coming up again. I am not 100% sure what you mean by:

set rancher.password=myPassword and console=ttyS0,115200 to the kernel line.

I realize you can use grub to setup the console login, but it does not sound like that is what you are suggesting. It would be ideal if this could be passed in via the cloud-config.yml, but I didn’t see anything to suggest that was possible. Were you able to get this working?

Thanks!

With the latest version of rancheros one can from the grub menu, select to autologin without password and also enable debugging output.