On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 14:26 -0600, Troy Dawson wrote:

> It normally is safe if you want things redirected out the console.  I do 
> know that it has stumped many a service tech when they take a machine 
> into their testing area's and can't get anything out on a monitor.
> But usually, it should go out through the serial port and the console, 
> as it says in the line
> 
> terminal --timeout=10 serial console
> 
> but I guess if the serial port is not playing nice, it might just be 
> stopping
I believe this is a bug in the Grub version shipped by the upstream
vendor. It does not hnour the 'timeout' parameter when a serial console
is being used.
I did try various combinations of timeout, but didn't have time to
pursue if fully as I had to get a cluster up and working for a customer.

There's been no problem with SuSE installs using grub and serial
consoles on identical hardware.

We configure serial terminals on all our machines. We redirect the BIOS
to serial also, so you have access right from the machine coming up.
Serial consoles in Linux are a very good idea - you can use Cyclades
type serial terminal servers (or a cheap multiport serial card),
Sun service processors (redirect serial to the SP and ssh in to the SP),
or Serial Over LAN via IPMI.
Using serial consoles you have true lights out management - I regularly
install machines from a remote location off-site, and diagnose problem
machines over a remote access session. Using a serial terminal, if (say)
a network card has a problem you can still get in and fix things.