Serial console and handshaking

[John <john%sixgirls.org@localhost>]

Hello,

A few weeks ago I had a problem when I tried to use a serial console for
my colocated server: the serial port is configured to use handshaking.
Because I was not running a terminal program on the machine that the
serial was connected to, my Amiga didn't start up entirely, and waited
there for hours until I went to the colo facility and discovered that all
it needed was for the handshaking to be on.

This seems a little dangerous to me; although leaving Minicom running
attached to a screen is relatively easy, I can only wonder what would
happen if the two machines got power cycled simultaneously. Chicken and
egg problem.

I am learning to administer a small fleet of SunBlade machines (cheap Sun
SPARC workstations with PC chipsets); they all run serial consoles, but
keep on running no matter if a serial cable is plugged in or not. Doesn't
this make more sense?

This brings up another issue: although 1 bit video on the Amiga chipset is
really fast, how much output can a kernel print before getting held? I've
wondered this because of the REALLY slow video on an old SPARCStation 2,
and now I wonder because of the serial handshaking issue. Can the kernel's
output buffer be increased?

And how does one turn off handshaking for the serial console?

Thanks,
John Klos