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