Puzzle involving serial console and ...??!?

[Garrett Cooper]

> On Aug 30, 2015, at 20:06, David Wolfskill <david at catwhisker.org> wrote:
> 
> I may be going mad -- that's likely the simplest explanation, and
> Occam's Razor would thus indicate that this hypothesis should be
> accorded a degree of plausibility, at least.
> 
> As described in <http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/FreeBSD/upgrade.html>,
> I have my own quirky ways of upgrading FreeBSD systems, the basics
> of which remain fundamentally unchanged for the last dozen years
> (well, a few more than that, but...).  In turn, much of that approach
> was borrowed from one of my pre-FreeBSD experiences in an IBM
> mainframe environment (as a "systems programmer").
> 
> What's causing me to question my tenuous grasp of reality is this:
> Referencing the above-cited Web page, my build machine ("freebeast")
> normally runs headless, and I use a cable to connect its serial
> port to the serial port of one of my other machines ("albert").
> 
> By doing so, I have a working serial console (once the FreeBSD
> loader gains control from the BIOS, at least)... half the time.
> 
> I have determined that whether or not I have a functioning serial
> console for freebeast depends on whether I boot albert from slice
> 1 or slice 2:  if from slice 1, it doesn't work; if from slice 2,
> it does.
> 
> Even when the contents of the 2 slices are functionally equivalent
> (that is, the file systems of the 2 slices are as "the same" as a
> "dump 0Lf | restore" pipeline can make them, except for a deliberate
> difference in the contents of /etc/fstab (as the root and /usr file
> systems are on different slices in the two cases)).
> 
> I use tip(1) on albert to access the serial port (as I have since
> 1998); I leave the speed at the default of 9600 because it has --
> save for this case -- always worked for me in the past.
> 
> Does anyone have any suggestions for figuring out what is really
> going on here?  While I can't just reboot "albert," I have another
> (similar) machine ("pogo") that I use for testing stuff that I plan
> to do to albert, and I could easily connect teh serial cable to
> pogo instead of albert and tinker with that.
> 
> Thanks.  I'm on the list, so list replies need not Cc: me.

David,
	Not sure what hardware you’re dealing with, but it doesn’t necessarily sound like a firmware bug; it would be helpful to determine what you’re running though… ran into issues with Dell r710s in the past where not having the right formula of firmware caused the machine to have quirky interactions on the serial console.
Cheers,
-NGie