[svlug] setserial

[Andrew C. Bertola]

Nathan,

I do agree, but for the one twist that made this particularly sticky. 
The Slackware rc.serial file _did_ work with RH 5.2 until the attempted
kernel upgrade.  That was the trigger event.  Marc nailed it, but out of
experience rather than troubleshooting technique.  It will be a while
(measured in hrs?) before I forget this one.

Drew


Nathan Myers wrote:
> 
> For the benefit of all the other newbies out there, I'd like
> to consider what really happened to lead to this Karl person's
> problem.>

> Leaving aside recriminations about posting crazy assertions on the
> SVLUG list, it appears that when he installed his Red Hat 5.2 system,
> instead of using the initialization files provided with it, he
> continued using his old Slackware scripts.
> 
> Those scripts were clearly buggy, but in a way that didn't expose
> the bugs when he used them with the old kernel.  The problem was not
> "one character in the file", but rather the origin of the file.  If
> the file had not incorrectly specified the serial port type, then
> the setserial program probably would have identified it correctly
> without help, as it does in the overwhelming majority of systems.
> 
> The lesson is that when something doesn't work, and the debugging
> logs don't reveal an answer, consider what you are doing which is
> non-standard, and doesn't match what the _tens_of_thousands_ of
> other people whose systems work fine are doing.  Running a Red Hat
> system on Slackware initialization scripts is precisely that, and
> should raise red flags any time.  I would be surprised to find that
> there are not a dozen other latent bugs in this "Karl" person's
> system, waiting to bite him for the same reason.
> 

-- 
Drew Bertola 

Visit Drew's Place at  http://home.earthlink.net/~abertola/home.html

--
echo "unsubscribe svlug" | mail majordomo at svlug.org
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ to unsubscribe
see http://www.svlug.org/mdstuff/lists.shtml for posting guidelines.