Chapter 6 Diagnostics, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting 159
About Communicating With the System
Todiagnose problems with your server, you need some way to enter system
commands and view output. There are three ways to do this.
1. If console output is not redirected to the RSC console, attach an ASCII character
terminal to serial port A.
Youcan attach a simple terminal or modem line to serial port A. For instructions,
see “How to Attach an Alphanumeric (ASCII) Terminal”on page 34.
2. Establish a tip connection from another Sun system.
The tip utility establishes a full-duplex terminal connection to a remote host.
Once the connection is established, a remote session using tip behaves like an
interactive session on a local terminal. For information about establishing a tip
connection, see “How to Set Up a tip Connection” on page 183.
3. Install a local graphics console on your server.
Theserver is shipped without amouse, keyboard, monitor, or frame buffer for the
display of graphics. Toinstall a local graphics console on a server, you must
install a graphics frame buffer into a PCI slot, and attach a mouse, monitor,and
keyboard to the appropriate back panel ports. See “How to Configurea Local
Graphics Console” on page 36 for detailed instructions.
Note – If you lose access to the console, but have a local display and physical access
to the server,you may gain access to the ok prompt using default NVRAM
parameters. For more information, see “How to Use Default NVRAM Parameters”
on page 178.
Note – If console output is redirected to the RSC console, you can also log in to an
RSC account on the server by using the RSC graphical user interface, or start a
command-line interface session by dialing in to the RSC modem or by using
telnet. Using RSC has the advantage of allowing access to the server console and
other RSC features even when the server operating system is not running. See the
Sun Remote System Control (RSC) User’s Guide for complete information about RSC.