17 Oct
2006
17 Oct
'06
1:39 p.m.
On Oct 17, 2006, at 2:05 PM, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
Indeed, I stand corrected, and I agree with your assessment. The
applications of RS232 certainly have changed over the years.
I dunno. Almost all the machines we have at work, which I admin, have
RS-232 console ports....
Well, all server-class computers have serial console ports. I
thought he was talking about PCs.
Ha! Not
anytime soon, for better or worse. The same thing was
said about things like the Z80, which is being made in larger
quantities than ever before.
Observe that I said that RS-232C was "obsolescent" and not
"obsolete"--I'm merely implying that it's on a slow decline. The
primary uses--connecting an external modem or terminal to a PC
aren't nearly as important today as they once were. USB and other
interfaces have largely usurped the position that the old "serial
port" interface enjoyed. we even set up our crappy Dell 1U servers with
a serial console connection. That's one use for a serial port (and
the
most common that I can think of now-a-days) that's been around for
well
over 30 years...
And, by the way, it's so much easier to use a text-based serial
console
over a remote connection from home to fix a problem with a machine,
than to either do KVM over IP or VNC-based system management. A lot
(if not most) of the machines that we care about enough to have
consoles, even PC's, allow access to the firmware/BIOS from the serial
console, as well as our bootloader and OS supporting a serial
console. :)
Oh absolutely. If you're serious about your data center, your
machines have serial consoles...it's as simple as that.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Cape Coral, FL