5 ms·
>it's been almost that long since you could buy a system with an RS232 interface at all (aside from maybe embedded systems that haven't been updated in years).
by wang_li 9y ago
>it's been almost that long since you could buy a system with an RS232 interface at all (aside from maybe embedded systems that haven't been updated in years).
I don't know what kind of computers you are buying, but I've yet to see a retail, server-class, motherboard without a 9-pin serial port in the back.
- SwellJoe 9y agoMy colo has a crash cart with keyboard/video/mouse. I don't know what I'd get out of using the serial port for anything. I think only one of my servers actually has an RS232 port, but I haven't actually looked at the hardware in over a year. But, maybe most servers do still have RS232. Nonetheless, rlogin/rcp/etc. are not useful tools for a serial console. I don't even know how you'd use them in such a circumstance. Are you using rlogin/rsh/rcp/rwhatever over RS232 to your servers? How? Why?
- wang_li 9y agoWell, in the past we'd use multi-port serial terminal servers and all the hosts had their serial ports as their console hardwired to the terminal server. These days the servers all include IPMI with KVM redirection. But the serial ports are still there. As far as using any TCP/IP based protocols over the serial port, I suppose you could do something silly with SLIP or PPP, but honestly I don't know why. The whole point of the serial port is that it's damned simple and firmware can easily initialize it and use it for IO extremely early in the boot process.