FreeBSD Serial Console Access

I enabled serial console access on one of my FreeBSD 5.0 RELEASE boxes. First I checked to see the serial ports available:

#dmesg | grep sio

usb0: USB revision 1.0

sio0 port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 on acpi0

sio0: type 16550A

sio1 port 0x2f8-0x2ff irq 3 on acpi0

sio1: type 16550A

I checked to see what devices I had:

#ls -al /dev/cua*

crw-------  1 root  wheel    28, 128 Feb  3 22:07 /dev/cuaa0

crw-rw----  1 uucp  dialer   28, 129 Feb  3 21:50 /dev/cuaa1

crw-rw----  1 uucp  dialer   28, 160 Feb  3 21:50 /dev/cuaia0

crw-rw----  1 uucp  dialer   28, 161 Feb  3 21:50 /dev/cuaia1

crw-rw----  1 uucp  dialer   28, 192 Feb  3 21:50 /dev/cuala0

crw-rw----  1 uucp  dialer   28, 193 Feb  3 21:50 /dev/cuala1

Then I added the following line to /etc/ttys

cuaa0   "/usr/libexec/getty std.38400"  vt100   on  secure

Then I restarted init via 'kill -HUP 1' and checked to see what had changed:

#ps -auxww | grep cua

root      493  0.0  0.3  1184  864  a0  Is+  Mon10PM   0:00.01 /usr/libexec/getty std.38400 cuaa0

Now I can use Windows HyperTerminal or a similar program to access my FreeBSD box using a serial cable and null modem.