Go slow, get the consoles on whatever you are console serving
to a known.  96/8/n/1 is a fine default.

Since consoles are used pretty rarely, I've never been a
fan of running them over 9600 baud.  Yes, you CAN run it
at 56kb or 128kb, and I suppose that would be handy if you
were living on that all the time (and 56k was AWESOME
when we got a VT420 attached to the unix server that was
in the next room), but it's pretty unneeded since 1990.

I ran my Sun consoles at 38k until the billionth time a new
sun came in for a couple days or whatever it was that made
me need to spend time screwing around with it.

Get the RAID down to 96 and see if it gets happier.

Oh, and make sure you've got the right cables - if you need HW
flow control (useful for longer runs), ensure that you have them.

Quoting Alex Dumitriu (alex@bitblot.com):
> (Quoting myself at the end for background)
> 
> I'm trying to set up a console server on NetBSD_1.6.1RC2 on i386. I have
> several devices connected to ports on a SIIG 4S PCI Serial expander card.
> I can't get any of those devices to work properly. When tip-ed in, I see
> recognizable bits with lots of garbage in between. I've twiddled just
> about every termios setting and tried multiple connection methods (tip,
> kermit, minicom, conserver) but I can't get it to work.
> 
> So I beat my head against this for a while and found out the following:
> 
> Things work fine on the system's built-in serial ports, with the same
> settings described below. The problem is confined to ports on the SIIG 4S
> board. Also, I am seeing silo overflows on the SIIG ports. I assume that
> this is directly related to the garbage I see on consoles connected to
> those ports.
> 
> So then, where can I go from here? Is there any way to manipulate the
> buffer on this card? What else can I try?
> 
> Thanks in advance...
> 
> Alex Dumitriu
> 
> > > Alright, that aside, I have a few devices that I can't talk to properly,
> > > but let's just pick one: I have a hardware RAID that wants a 38400 8n1 no
> > > flow control terminal. Those settings work fine on a laptop with
> > > hyperterm.
> > >
> > > My /etc/remote entry looks like this:
> > >
> > > oldraid:dv=/dev/tty02:br#38400:pa=none:dc:
> > > and I've stty-ed the serial port to look like this:
> > >
> > > # stty -f /dev/tty02 -a
> > > speed 38400 baud; 0 rows; 0 columns;
> > > lflags: -icanon -isig -iexten -echo -echoe -echok -echoke -echonl
> > >         -echoctl -echoprt -altwerase -noflsh -tostop -flusho -pendin
> > >         -nokerninfo -extproc