Re: Adding disk on V245

["John D. Baker" <jdbaker%mylinuxisp.com@localhost>]

Off-topic, but peripheral(!) to the discussion:

On Wed, 23 Nov 2016 09:42:57 -0500, Kurt Lidl wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 12:39:04AM -0700, Gordon Zaft wrote:
> > I can't get into firmware on this right now as the serial port it's
> >on for console is a crappy USB that doesn't seem to pass along a
> > BREAK :-(.

Which USB-RS232 adapter is that, so we can know to avoid it?  (I've been
fortunate that all the ones I've encountered so far will send BREAK, at
least under NetBSD.  Under MacOS X (10.4.11 PPC), only the KeySpan
adapters will send BREAK--the ProLific ones didn't when I tried them).

> The old-school way of doing this is to set the baud rate to 50,
> and then keep sending ctrl-@.  Which ought to send enough zero
> bits to make a 9600 bps console think 'break' was sent.  Then
> switch back to 9600 bps.

Unfortunately, USB-RS232 dongles are likely to be unable to set a speed
below about 300bps (maybe higher).  A friend of mine discovered this
empirically while building current-loop adapters for his ASR-33 TeleType.
Its upper limit of 110baud was lower than his USB-RS232 dongle allowed.
(The serial port of a Tandy 200 did the job, though.)

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