Re: OOB core router connectivity wish list

[Nick Hilliard <nick () foobar org>]

On 12/01/2013 18:54, Jimmy Hess wrote:
> The year on the calendar has little to do with the usefulness of
> rs232, there has been no thorough replacement for every situation.

Tell that to Juniper who appear to think that running an RE console at 9600
baud is actually OK in a emergency situation in a production environment.
Do the people who design monumental stupidity of this scale into systems
ever get to hear about real life customer requirements?  Every single UART
in existence today supports 115200 or greater, more likely 230400.  What is
the problem here?

> Rs232 also a simpler technology

No it really isn't - from an operational point of view.  Ok, the basic
signalling is far simpler, but why do we have straight-thru cables,
cross-over cables, null modem cables, with db9, db15, db25, RJ11, at least
3-4 common varieties of RJ45, RS232 over USB (entirely USB driver
dependent), along with 7/8 bits, N/O/E parity and 0/1/2 stop bit settings.

And who in the name of gibbering lunacy thought that 2 stop bits on an
RSP440/ASR9000 was a smart idea?  Is there anything else in the known
universe which uses 2 stop bits??  I mean seriously Cisco, WTF??
Seriously, WTF.

I don't want to have to deal with emergencies which have me fumbling around
in my toolbox at 02:00 to try to guess which particular pinout is used by
some godforsaken piece of kit in the corner which happens to have died.  Or
to have to deal with some dumbass kernel panic on my mac because the
manufacturer's PL2303 driver is fighting with the cheap knockoff clone
converter.  Or try to reverse engineer the fact that some brain damaged
vendor needs a female DTE or male DCE cable.  Or deal with line noise on a
cable which is slightly loose, and which caused bootup to fail silently.
These are all real-life problems which have happened, btw.  Some regularly.

I am tired of dealing with this stupidity.  I don't want a toolbox where I
feel that it's necessary to pack in 2xDB9 + 2xDB25 + RJ45 + pinout
converter + USB-serial converter and then have to remember the settings for
the lot of them in such a way that I don't need to carry around a manual
for dealing with this crap at 3 in the morning.

Kill it with fire.

I want OOB with ethernet, MDIX, 100base-TX or 1000base-TX, with DHCP client
support.  With a cherry.

Nick