Trouble Enabling Raspberry Pi 2 Serial Console

[hawktalon]

Hi!

I am new to the world of penentration testing and hope you guys forgive me if this is a newb question.

I'm running Kali 2.0.1 (couldn't get 2.0 to boot properly) on Raspberry Pi 2 B+ and I'm trying to control Kali via serial console. The end goal is to have a low level Bluetooth connection to the RPi so that I can do pen-testing with no wires at all. This method worked in Raspbian but somehow I couldn't get it to work in Kali.

When it I power on the RPi, the only line I get from serial console is the single line "Uncompressing Linux... done, booting the kernel.". I can't even get to the login dialogue. I've looked into the inittab but it seems to be fine with only one line "T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyAMA0 115200 vt100".

Is there something I misssed? Thanks in advance!

[steev]

You need to add "console=ttyAMA0,115200" to /boot/cmdline.txt (just replace one of the (accidental) duplicate "console=tty1" options) - you will also (if it doesn't exist) need to add ttyAMA0 to /etc/securetty so that root can log in over serial console. One thing to note is that, at some point, the kernel takes over, and I can't recall which order it picks what gets the console output - if you want to be doubly sure, you can just remove the console=tty1 completely and only have console=ttyAMA0,115200 in your cmdline.txt file - you'll still be able to login on tty1 when getty spawns.

[justinbieber]

You need to add "console=ttyAMA0,115200" to /boot/cmdline.txt (just replace one of the (accidental) duplicate "console=tty1" options) - you will also (if it doesn't exist) need to add ttyAMA0 to /etc/securetty so that root can log in over serial console. One thing to note is that, at some point, the kernel takes over, and I can't recall which order it picks what gets the console output - if you want to be doubly sure, you can just remove the console=tty1 completely and only have console=ttyAMA0,115200 in your cmdline.txt file - you'll still be able to login on tty1 when getty spawns.

Unfortunately this hasn't worked for me. No console on my RP2 with Kali.
This is what I have on /boot/cmdline.txt and /etc/securetty:

root@kali:~# cat /boot/cmdline.txt
console=ttyAMA0,115200
root@kali:~# ls -lt /boot/cmdline.txt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 120 Oct 29 04:50 /boot/cmdline.txt
root@kali:~# grep ttyAMA0 /etc/securetty
ttyAMA0