Hey guys,
So my homelab employs full disk encryption. This means that I can’t do any maintenance that would require a reboot on it (upgrading the Kernel) unless I am physically present. Since it is a RHEL system, at one point I used GitHub - gsauthof/dracut-sshd: Provide SSH access to initramfs early user space on Fedora and other systems that use Dracut. However, the initramfs has stopped being reachable via SSH. I am not too terribly concerned about the security implications of having the initramfs open to the network, but if I should be, I’d be interested in knowing why. For what it’s worth, Dracut-sshd has the ability for me to configure it to only allow entering the crypto luks password, and so I did (no commands can be executed via ssh, only a password prompt is shown).
Anyway, I thought it would be cool to use one of my spare Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ boards to set up a serial console that I access over the network. I currently have no better use for them anyway - and they don’t burn a lot of power. The problem is that my homelab largely relies on consumer hardware. Is there a way I can access a serial console via the raspberry pi over usb? I figured the Pi’s GPIO pins might come in handy.