Console-ing thoughts from PopWhen green was a colour ...
Well, time has moved on (more's the pity!) and physical consoles have now been replaced with virtual ones.
Sometimes you just have to connect via the system console. Console yourself How you connect to the console will depend on your system configuration. If you're on a small or old standalone system, you'll probably use the ASCII screen I was reminiscing about. But if you're on a larger or newer system - one that is partitioned (LPARs) - you'll either use the Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM), or a Hardware Management Console (HMC). Console connection via IVM and HMC With IVM you can open a virtual terminal session to a partition. Of course, the HMC itself serves as a console for one or several physical servers, but here we're only speaking of making a console connection to a single LPAR. You can select a single LPAR, then Console Window > Open Terminal Window If you get a message "A terminal session is already open ... " then someone else is logged in. You can have the fun of working out what Close Terminal Window is for. Remote Console The HMC console is a bit of a clunky terminal. Using Putty is much more pleasant (cut and paste, colours, scroll history). To use a terminal emulator and still connect as a console, you'll need to use Remote Virtual Terminal. If you connect to the HMC via a browser, you can check if you can do this remote console thing by selecting HMC Management > Administration > Remote Command Execution and Remote Virtual Terminal. Here's what those screens look like. Once that's done, you can ssh to the HMC and run the command vtmenu. That should display a menu of the managed systems which the HMC is connected to. From there you should be given a selection of LPARs. More details are available on the HMC hints wiki. Be a local anywhere When you set up a new user through smit, you get a question "User can LOGIN?" and another one "User can LOGIN REMO Bringing it all together If you really need to connect via a console, there are all sorts of ways of doing it, which is consoling, but a bit odd, because the word "console" has nothing to do with "consolation." It's actually from the Latin con- (with) +solidare (make solid). A console is there to bring everything together when it's all fallen apart - even your network. Of course, in my day networks were a luxury ...
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