/frontdoor

Display system information at the linux boot prompt

Primary LanguageC

FrontDoor

This is a little program I hacked together to display information about the VMs I have floating about the place. Often I need to ssh into to the machines to do things and, if I don't know the IP address due to DHCP lease changes I have to use the VM console. This can be a pain. I figured it would be nice to be able to see at a glance what the IP address of a VM was then I could just ssh in directly.

Requirements

FrontDoor uses ncurses, so to compile it install the ncurses-dev package.

Installation on Ubuntu 16.04

The code currently only supports Linux.

  1. Compile the code by running make
  2. Move the program into place, I suggest /usr/local/sbin
  3. Execute systemctl edit getty@tty1 and add the following content
[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --noclear -n -l /usr/local/sbin/frontdoor -8 %I $TERM
  1. Reboot

Installation on older machines

Alter /etc/init/tty1.conf as follows

# tty1 - getty
#
# This service maintains a getty on tty1 from the point the system is
# started until it is shut down again.

start on stopped rc RUNLEVEL=[2345]
stop on runlevel [!2345]

respawn
exec /sbin/getty -n -l /usr/local/sbin/frontdoor -8 38400 tty1

After a reboot you should see the new front door screen looking something like the following:

Example Output