[Savannah-hackers] Re: subversions.gnu.org now OK

[Joel N. Weber II]

           It turned out that the BIOS of subversions.gnu.org was operating at
   9600 and not 38400. I changed the getty + kernel parameters to operate at 
this
   speed and we can now see the bios + grub when subversions.gnu.org is 
rebooting.

Right.  I generally tend to set up consoles for PC servers at 9600
baud, for consistency with old sun hardware and routers (such as the
cisco we have at 59 Temple, and the NetGear ISDN router I have at
home).  (I'm pretty sure that all of those default to 9600 baud.)
Having everything at the same speed is highly advantageous if you have
cables plugged into the wrong places and you can't figure out what is
what.  Also, 9600 baud may be ever so slightly more reliable than
38400 baud.

The management port on fencepost is at 57600 or whatever exactly the
speed in that vicinity is, because that's what that port defaults to.

I believe the console port on switchp is autosensing.

I'm not sure why it was decided that things needed to be set to 38400
baud; I do think the linux examples use that speed, and perhaps we
fell into the trap of faster is more impotant than correct.

It's unfortunate that people decided that they were going to make
drastic changes without discussing it on system-hackers first, so that
folks could discuss things, and maybe we could have better remembered
all the places the baud rate would have needed to be changed.
sysadmin.texi says that people should discuss things like this on
system-hackers, as far as I know, so it makes me wonder once again why
I bother spending time writing documentation.  (We've also observed
things like ``I don't know how to contact the people in France about
problems with fr.fsf.org'' being sent to system-hackers, for which the
answers are in sysadmin.texi, and ``francisco-franco and
benito-mussolini were down, and therefore no kerberos servers were
available'', when sysadmin.texi mentions quantum-bogodynamics too, as
do the DNS files.)