As a general principle, servers with PC-style BIOS suck. If you ever worked with a real server with native support for a serial console, then anything else feels like a crude crutch.
HP servers with iLo2 are no exceptions.
At least unless you’re unwilling to shell out additional money for the feature packs.
You get a crude vt100 emulation during the boot sequence, but once the operating system starts, this falls back to a real serial device. The trick is thus to configure grub, the kernel, and the gettys in a way to get consistent console access all through the boot process.
Now add XEN and and root in an encrypted LVM volume to the mix and things start to become nasty. So here is my solution, for all those weary souls googling for a recipe for Debian (etch):
title Xen 3.0.3-1-i386-pae / Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.18-6-xen-686
root (hd0,0)
kernel /xen-3.0.3-1-i386-pae.gz dom0_mem=128M com1=115200,8n1,0x2f8,3
module /vmlinuz-2.6.18-6-xen-686 root=/dev/mapper/vg_main-lv_root ro console=ttyS0 xencons=ttyS0
module /initrd.img-2.6.18-6-xen-686
And don’t forget to note these parameters in the comments in /bot/grub/menu.lst unless you want to manually add them after each kernel upgrade. i.e.:
## Xen hypervisor options to use with the default Xen boot option
# xenhopt=dom0_mem=128M com1=115200,8n1,0x2f8,3
## Xen Linux kernel options to use with the default Xen boot option
# xenkopt=console=ttyS0 xencons=ttyS0
If you’ve forgotten that, you can save yourself the trip to the server room by manually editing the boot config using grub’s edit functionality.
Enabling login via ttyS0 is then just a matter of
T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS0 115200 vt100
in /etc/inittab, and ttyS0 in /etc/securetty.
Once you enable ssh access in iLo2, you can reach the console of your server from any *ix shell via a simple ssh command.