Re: More BCP: revenge of RS232 and CLIs

[George Jones <gmj@pobox.com>]

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Joel N. Weber II wrote:

> I'm a little skeptical that being able to change the baud rate is
> really beneficial.  It seems like if the console port is always at a
> fixed speed, there's less worrying about whether I'm seeing nothing on
> the console port because this sparcstation 1 my friend gave me is
> actually dead, or if it's just at a weird baud rate for some strange
> reason.

You've had that problem too ?

>  And I've generally found in-band management to be a good
> option for day to day work when the extra speed can be nice.

Sure, but we're taking about this because there are times
when you positivly, absolutly have to manage the device
and in-band ain't working for some reason.

>
> A way to reset the device's communications parameters on its primary
> management interface may be worth mandating.  It may be that sending a
> break to a serial port is a valid way to do that that doesn't require
> building more hardware.

I added sending a break as an example.

>
> I think we should consider mandating that it MUST be possible to
> configure a network device by plugging its serial port into a terminal
> whose display understands the 95 printing ASCII characters, carriage
> return, newline, bell, and backspace.

Ugg.  In one sense you're right.  In another, I'm not sure people
with non-latin alphabets (pictographs, ideaographs) would like
it if we did that.   I really don't want to get into that one.

>  A device MAY send terminal
> control commands that assume a more advanced terminal, such as a
> vt100, in response to the user sending commands to the device, such as
> control characters to edit the command line, as long as it is still
> possible to completely configure the device from a terminal which does
> not support these features.

Come on, say it with me "ASR-33"...."Tel-e-TYpe".

I agree with the sentements, just not sure what to do.

Thanks,
---George