[rescue] Why Phoenix ServerBIOS serial console sucks

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, February 25, 2002 at 15:26:03 (-0600), Bill Bradford wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] Why .* sucks (was Re: FDDI card)
>
> On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 04:13:40PM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > I suspect you didn't test it very well.  That was undoubtably a Phoenix
> > ServerBIOS, and they are about the worst designed, poorest excuse, for
> > providing serial console support I could ever imagine.  It may work,
> > just barely, if you connect it directly to another PC running the
> > special client, at 38.4kbps or better, and if all the other factors are
> > in your favour.  It's useless at 19.2kbps through a terminal server to
> > any other kind of "terminal" -- worse than useless -- it can prevent a
> > successful boot even!
> 
> We had these hooked up to an old Portmaster (30port) and didnt have any
> problems...

Did you actually use them (i.e. successfully examine and reset any BIOS
settings)?  How?  What speed?

I tried everything from 9600bps to 38400bps, and even when it wasn't
dropping characters left right and centre you still couldn't type to
it.  The "emulation" it requires is pretty far out in left field
either.  Xterm couldn't make heads or tails of it, nor could a NetBSD
console, nor a BSDI console.  If you made the mistake of logging the
output with conserver or such you'd better be prepared for big and
basically unreadable logs!

ServerBIOS serial console support doesn't only just not work, it sucks too!

(And then there's the issue of port sharing with the OS "console" --
recent versions of the IPMI spec (1.5) may fix this, but I have my doubts)

And speaking of IPMI, everything you need to talk to the BMC is secret.
Some of the info is in VA's software on SourceForge, and if you search
you can download the IPMI specs anonymously from Intel without signing
the stupid NDA, but that's about as far as you'll get!  ;-)

What's really insane is that with a tiny bit of real programming they
could have made an absolutely superb serial console that was completely
ASCII-only, i.e. 100% terminal emulation independent!  THEY OWN THE
BIOS!  They could even make M$-DOg bring command.com up on a serial port!

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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