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Will the Serial Console Ever Die?
simpz writes "Will the serial port as a console connection ever be displaced — especially for devices such as switches, routers, SAN boxes, etc.? In one sense it's a simple connection. But it is the only current port that, in order to use, you need to know about wiring / baud rates / parity, etc. It has non-standard pinouts. And it is becoming too slow to upload firmware to dead devices, as the firmware updates get larger. Also, the serial port is rapidly disappearing from new laptops — which is where you often really need it, in data centers. Centronics, PS/2, and current loop are mostly defunct. Is there any sign on the horizon of a USB console connection?"
It will never die. It will be around forever. Technicians, thousands of years from now will have to interface with wireless psychic rs232 adapters so as to configure their Cisco hyperdrives.
Spitting Image thought it was fun. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDlj0jBtYmQ - back in '85
And Apple did with the iMac in 1998. I wonder what was Steve Jobs' reaction when he was told that the Xserve is going to have a serial port, considered "legacy" by Apple since the iMac in 1998.
Yes, they filter dust in my desktop machines.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I attended its funeral yesterday. It was an open-casket ceremony, and people just couldn't seem to resist fingering the deceased. Sadly it didn't respond.
Wait till you learn about DLC
Those crossover ethernet cables are way less secure than serial cables! Like, as soon as you plug one end into your laptop and the other end into the server, the server is going to get 7 different trojans! In the BIOS!
Right.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
You young whippersnapers and your newfangled serial consoles.
Back when men were men, this is what a manly console looked like; http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/360-91-panel.jpg
Ian Ameline
We buy those all the time for OOB redundancy. 56k US Robotics modems run about $300 now though. Pretty funny as I used to have boxes of the old 28.8 and 33.6 ones from when I shutdown a modem bank that I recycled. Now I get to put in purchase orders for 10 modems at a total of 3k. Always makes me laugh.
According to some otherwise good SciFi (Stargate comes to mind) even alien devices use Serial.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Penny-fraction-pinching? Sir, that figure you've mentioned is fifty pennies! Why, with those, I could buy...
...
...those are FIFTY WHOLE PENNIES, SIR, AND I INTEND TO KEEP THEM!
not much, just being forced to manually insert line breaks into my comment
Would grandma be using a serial port in the first place?
Jackass.
Yeah, I tried to put XP on my new machine a couple years ago. It couldn't see the RAID array, so I grabbed the driver CD and pressed (whatever) to load the driver.... and it said INSERT FLOPPY DISK! WTF?!? It might as well have said "Insert papyrus scroll"!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
and all those cute baby blue cables you get when you buy cisco gear
Ugh. Thank God a recent HP Procurve purchase got me a pair of tactical black cables...
There's no place like