rcons - Remote Console

See rcons manpage for more information.

Most enterprise servers do not have video adapters installed with the machine and often do not provide a method for attaching a physical monitor/keyboard/mouse to get the display output. For this purpose xCAT can assist the system administrator to view the console over a “Serial-over-LAN” (SOL) connection through the BMC.

Configure the correct console management by modifying the node definition:

  • For OpenPOWER, IPMI managed server:

    chdef -t node -o <noderange> cons=ipmi

  • For OpenPOWER, OpenBMC managed servers:

    chdef -t node -o <noderange> cons=openbmc

Open a console to compute1:

rcons compute1

Note: The keystroke ctrl+e c . will disconnect you from the console.

Troubleshooting

General

xCAT has been integrated with 3 kinds of console server service, they are

rcons command relies on one of them. The conserver and goconserver packages should have been installed with xCAT as they are part of the xCAT dependency packages. If you hope to try confluent, see confluent.

For systemd based systems, goconserver is used by default. If you are having problems seeing the console, try the following.

  1. Make sure goconserver is configured by running makegocons.

  2. Check if goconserver is up and running

    systemctl status goconserver.service

  3. If goconserver is not running, start the service using:

    systemctl start goconserver.service

  4. Try makegocons -q [<node>] to verify if the node has been registered.

  5. Invoke the console again: rcons <node>

More details for goconserver, see goconserver documentation.

[Deprecated] If conserver is used, try the following.

  1. Make sure conserver is configured by running makeconservercf.

  2. Check if conserver is up and running

    [sysvinit] service conserver status
[systemd] systemctl status conserver.service

  3. If conserver is not running, start the service using:

    [sysvinit] service conserver start
[systemd] systemctl start conserver.service

  4. Invoke the console again: rcons <node>