ProLiant Virtual Serial Port

While working through the configuration of iLO3 for our HP DL380 G7 servers, I found a few pages talking about the Virtual Serial Port (VSP).

This sounded interesting so I though I would try it out. I was using this page as a guide http://www.fatmin.com/2011/06/redirect-linux-console-to-hp-ilo-via-ssh.html but it was a bit out of date.

The first thing to mention was that this does indeed work with iLO3. When configuring your iLO3, remember that in order to ssh to iLO3 you must have a PTY (-t -t), use protocol version 2 (-2) and use DSA keys (ssh-keygen -t dsa). My old configuration for older versions of iLO used exactly the opposite for all of these settings which took some time to figure out (and HP only recently identified/fixed the bugs with ssh keys).

Once you can ssh to your iLO interface, you can issue the command
VSP
and it will start a terminal emulator (actually, it just passes everything through to your terminal program so you can use xterm if you want but safer to assume a vt102). To exit, press ESCape and then ( and you will return to the iLO prompt.

For the OS configuration, I found that I had to make a few alterations. First, RHEL6/CentOS6 uses upstarts and not inittab. If you are not booting with a serial console you must create your own init script:
/etc/init/ttyS1.conf
# ttyS1 - agetty
#
# This service maintains a agetty on ttyS1 for iLO3 VSP.

stop on runlevel [S016]
start on runlevel [235]

respawn
exec agetty -8 -L -w /dev/ttyS1 115200 vt102

You can then enable the console with the command
start ttyS1
Next time you reboot it should start automatically.

In order to log in as root you must add the terminal it to the /etc/securetty file:
echo '/dev/ttyS1' >>  /etc/securetty

So that was all good. Now I want to roll this out to all my servers. To do this I needed some puppet magic. Not surprising, puppet let me down on most of the steps for this.
# Install the init script. This one is easy, just dump in the file 

file { "/etc/init/ttyS1.conf":
...
}

# Add the entry to securetty
augeas { "securetty_ttyS1":
# Ha ha. securetty has a special lens which is different to most other config files
context => "/files/etc/securetty",
changes => [ "ins 0 before /files/etc/securetty/1",
             "set /files/etc/securetty/0 ttyS1",
],
onlyif  => "match *[.='ttyS1'] size == 0",
}

# Enable & start the service. My version of puppet does not support upstarts on CentOS so I can't do this:
service { "ttyS1":
provider => upstart,
ensure => running,
enable => true,
}
# Instead I have created my own type
define upstart($ensure = "running", enable = "true") {
        service { "upstart-$name":
                provider => 'base',
                ensure => $ensure,
                enable => $enable,
                hasstatus => true,
                start  => "/sbin/initctl start $name",
                stop   => "/sbin/initctl stop $name",
                status => "/sbin/initctl status $name | /bin/grep -q '/running'",
        }
}
upstart{"ttyS1": }

And finally, I need to make sure the server BIOS is configured with the VSP.

package { "hp-health": ensure => present } ->
service { "hp-health":
        ensure => running,
        hasstatus => true,
        hasrestart => true,
        enable => true,
} ->
exec { "vsp":
        logoutput => "true",
        path => ["/bin", "/sbin", "/usr/bin", "/usr/sbin"],
        command => "/sbin/hpasmcli -s 'SET SERIAL VIRTUAL COM2'",
        unless => "/sbin/hpasmcli -s 'SHOW SERIAL VIRTUAL' | grep 'The virtual serial port is currently COM2'",
        require => Class['hp_drivers::service'],
} ->

# while we are messing with the serial ports, make COM1 work as the physical device
exec { "com1":
        logoutput => "true",
        path => ["/bin", "/sbin", "/usr/bin", "/usr/sbin"],
        command => "/sbin/hpasmcli -s 'SET SERIAL EMBEDDED PORTA COM1'",
        unless => "/sbin/hpasmcli -s 'SHOW SERIAL EMBEDDED' | grep 'Embedded serial port A: COM1'",
        require => Class['hp_drivers::service'],
}