vmware serial console

Posted by nuxi on 2008-Mar-27 at 20:57:06 in Computers (Login to reply)

Running vmware headless is very convient for running servers to debug various things. The real trick is getting the serial port working because vmware doesn't make a TTY device, it makes a named pipe. Luckily someone on IRC helped me out with that part by recommending an application called Socat. Now I can do kernel hacking in vmware without needing the GUI open in case networking doesn't come up!

socat UNIX-CONNECT:/tmp/vmware-console PTY,link=/tmp/vmware-serial,raw,echo=0

/tmp/vmware-console is the named pipe created by vmware. The correct settings for the serial device are:
* Use named pipe
* This end is the server
* The other end is an application

/tmp/vmware-serial is the TTY device to give to minicom or your serial console app of choice. The speed settings don't seem to matter.

You can put those files anywhere, but minicom has been modified by some distros to not like TTYs that aren't in /dev

vmrun can be used to control the state of the VM.

This is also good if you are running production boxes in vmware.