Chapter 26. Serial Communications

Table of Contents
26.1. Synopsis
26.2. Serial Terminology and Hardware
26.3. Terminals
26.4. Dial-in Service
26.5. Dial-out Service
26.6. Setting Up the Serial Console

26.1. Synopsis

UNIX® has always had support for serial communications as the very first UNIX® machines relied on serial lines for user input and output. Things have changed a lot from the days when the average terminal consisted of a 10-character-per-second serial printer and a keyboard. This chapter covers some of the ways serial communications can be used on FreeBSD.

After reading this chapter, you will know:

  • How to connect terminals to a FreeBSD system.

  • How to use a modem to dial out to remote hosts.

  • How to allow remote users to login to a FreeBSD system with a modem.

  • How to boot a FreeBSD system from a serial console.

Before reading this chapter, you should:

All FreeBSD documents are available for download at https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/doc/

Questions that are not answered by the documentation may be sent to <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>.
Send questions about this document to <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org>.