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Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2011 00:06:36 -0700
From: perryh@pluto.rain.com
To: christian.baer@uni-dortmund.de, tevans.uk@googlemail.com
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Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Crashes with Promise controller
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Tom Evans <tevans.uk@googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 6:31 PM, Christian Baer
> <christian.baer@uni-dortmund.de> wrote:
> > A serial console is easy enough to set up on a Sun for example, but in
> > this case, I am running a simple AthlonXP, which has nothing for that
> > sort of help. I would need a special card for that and those cose quite
> > a bit. :-(
>
> Not that special - you just need a serial port on two computers. If
> your computers don't have serial ports, USB serial adapters work fine,

While it should work up to a point, a USB serial port is not the
ideal choice for a console port (on the machine that is crashing),
because it requires the USB stack to be working.  If that machine
has no built-in serial port, but has an available PCI slot, adding
a PCI serial port is likely the best choice.

> and are cheap, as are (single port) PCI serial cards.
>
> Alternatively, if both computers have firewire ports, you can use
> dcons, and all you need is a cable.