Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 14:25:23 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: "Brian T.Schellenberger" <bts@babbleon.org> Cc: Sean Hamilton <sh@planetquake.com>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Beep after shutdown Message-ID: <3D373243.4CB5F22F@mindspring.com> References: <002101c22d73$972ec970$f019e8d8@slugabed.org> <3D35A901.44758CE6@mindspring.com> <20020718133538.67B48BB2C@this.is.fake.com>
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"Brian T.Schellenberger" wrote: > Obviusly for older hardware that can't power itself off, so that you know > when it's done before you hit the power switch. Personally I don't > understand the problem since I usually can look at the screen display and > even if I can't I can hear the disk spinning down but maybe his disks are too > quiet. The display problem presumably arises on a setup with no console > where he's shutting down via an ssh command or something. Ssh gets cut off > before the machine actually finishes shutting down, of course, so it's hard > to tell when it finishes. And presumably if you are in the middle of noisy > machine room it's hard to hear the disk spin down. > > So he wants a hardware beep to tell him it's safe. Most drivers, including those for "machines which can go `Bing!'", are shut down by the time you would want the "Bing!" to happen, so that their putative microphones don't do evil things like generate interrupts which need to be handled by kernels which are no longer there. Not to mention that ACPI has probably already powered down the sound card hardware anyway... I thought I told you not to mention that?!? Most rack mount hardware have no voice boxes (no speakers). So I guess he wants it out the PC speaker that's not there, either? I suppose I was just surprised that someone would be using SSH for a console, when they were close enough to a box jammed in a rack between other boxes, all of them making noise, that they could hear the sealed-in speaker through the tiny front vents at all. Over the fans. Don't get me wrong: I like the idea of feedback from the device to tell me it's doing something. At a former employer, they were so afraid that someone might find out that the hardware was actually a PC motherboard inside a big heavy box that they refused to permit BIOS messages out the serial console, and they refused to permit the serial console to be marked as a console in the FreeBSD kernel, so that the customer wouldn't see that it was a *gasp!* UNIX system from the boot messages, either. The result was a box that, when powered on, did memory tests with no feedback to the serial console or anywhere else for a very long time, while the BIOS POST'ed, and then loaded up FreeBSD, and took a long time to start there too (dependency order problems in the startup scripts leading to sleeps to get the timing right), after which it downloaded firmware to the networking cards, and then, maybe 20 seconds after that, it popped up a serial console login prompt. Thus... the first thing you saw was the network card lights going on solid, then the first indication you got that anything at all was happening was, almost two minutes later, they go black, and thirty seconds after that, they come back on, start blinking with the traffic, and you get a login prompt. Yeah, the first couple of times I tried it, I thought the damn thing was DOA, too. Quite the delay of gratification for your new investment of tens of thousands of dollars. So I understand wanting some kind of feedback, even if you're the only person who has any human factors experience at your company. On the other hand, the feedback you want is probably not the "Bing!" being asked for here... e.g. a PC speaker entombed in a 1U sheet metal sarcophogas in a 19 inch moral equivalent of The Valley Of The Kings with all the other entombed PC speakers, in a howling sandstorm of cooling fans... is not likely to end up giving you satisfaction. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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