Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2015 23:35:49 -0700 From: Garrett Cooper <yaneurabeya@gmail.com> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Puzzle involving serial console and ...??!? Message-ID: <E1633551-12CF-42F9-AA59-59C93A5E408C@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20150831030639.GH1153@albert.catwhisker.org> References: <20150831030639.GH1153@albert.catwhisker.org>
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> On Aug 30, 2015, at 20:06, David Wolfskill <david@catwhisker.org> = wrote: >=20 > I may be going mad -- that's likely the simplest explanation, and > Occam's Razor would thus indicate that this hypothesis should be > accorded a degree of plausibility, at least. >=20 > As described in = <http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/FreeBSD/upgrade.html>, > I have my own quirky ways of upgrading FreeBSD systems, the basics > of which remain fundamentally unchanged for the last dozen years > (well, a few more than that, but...). In turn, much of that approach > was borrowed from one of my pre-FreeBSD experiences in an IBM > mainframe environment (as a "systems programmer"). >=20 > What's causing me to question my tenuous grasp of reality is this: > Referencing the above-cited Web page, my build machine ("freebeast") > normally runs headless, and I use a cable to connect its serial > port to the serial port of one of my other machines ("albert"). >=20 > By doing so, I have a working serial console (once the FreeBSD > loader gains control from the BIOS, at least)... half the time. >=20 > I have determined that whether or not I have a functioning serial > console for freebeast depends on whether I boot albert from slice > 1 or slice 2: if from slice 1, it doesn't work; if from slice 2, > it does. >=20 > Even when the contents of the 2 slices are functionally equivalent > (that is, the file systems of the 2 slices are as "the same" as a > "dump 0Lf | restore" pipeline can make them, except for a deliberate > difference in the contents of /etc/fstab (as the root and /usr file > systems are on different slices in the two cases)). >=20 > I use tip(1) on albert to access the serial port (as I have since > 1998); I leave the speed at the default of 9600 because it has -- > save for this case -- always worked for me in the past. >=20 > Does anyone have any suggestions for figuring out what is really > going on here? While I can't just reboot "albert," I have another > (similar) machine ("pogo") that I use for testing stuff that I plan > to do to albert, and I could easily connect teh serial cable to > pogo instead of albert and tinker with that. >=20 > Thanks. I'm on the list, so list replies need not Cc: me. David, Not sure what hardware you=E2=80=99re dealing with, but it = doesn=E2=80=99t necessarily sound like a firmware bug; it would be = helpful to determine what you=E2=80=99re running though=E2=80=A6 ran = into issues with Dell r710s in the past where not having the right = formula of firmware caused the machine to have quirky interactions on = the serial console. Cheers, -NGie=
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