[rescue] Amiga videos online for your enjoyment

[Ahmed Ewing]

On 5/24/07, Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:

> Just for starters... if you configure a Sun PROM for 38400bps on the console,
> why does it revert to 9600bps in the OS?  Can they not come out of the 1970s
> and detect the right speed?

This might be a silly question, but what benefit does one gain from
trying to force a 38400 baud rate on a Sun rather than making whatever
terminal device/program simply emulate a vt100, which it is virtually
guaranteed to be able to do? Unless you're actually sending something
other than console text over that connection, I can't see the
rationale.

This has confused me to no end on the Minnow arrays (StorEdge 3000
series), which default to 38400 for the serial connection to the
firmware menus, but it should be noted that those are actually made by
Dothill [0] for Sun. The only possible reason I've come up with so far
is that the ASCII menu system in the controller firmware[1] is too
intensive to refresh reliably over 9600bps, but that seems dubious at
best.

> While I'm at it, why does an install on a
> *HEADLESS* Sun still result in the system defaulting to a graphics console setup?

Probably because there are five different OE installation clusters to
choose from, and you specifically told it to use a cluster that
features a windowing system (i.e., anything besides Core). I'm not
quite sure what your complaint is here. Even if you are installing via
JumpStart, it is a trivial matter to remove any packages you choose
after declaring the intended cluster via the profile (or via pkgrm in
a finish script, if your Jumpstart environment is less traditional).
Whose fault do you assert it to be besides your own for not
deselecting the GUI packages when given the opportunity during
installation?

If you've ever had to use any of the add-on "lights-out" solutions on
PC servers, I think you'd probably be counting your blessings on the
Sun side. :-)

-A


[0] Formerly Boxhill, a name I learned to hate when forced to manually
format standard SCSI disks to their ass-backward custom geometries.
And don't get me started on the crappy black-with-red enclosures
themselves. Grr.

[1] And speaking of ass-backward, only they would think it were a good
idea for the SE3x000s to have a graphic menu over the serial
connection, and a CLI that required an OS-level software package to be
installed to access. :-/ I could go on, by the way.