On Aug 7, 2005, at 4:23 PM, J.C. Roberts wrote:'
At times I wonder if Apple not supporting serial is smart or dumb but
I never seem to come to a conclusion...
OT: I think it's dumb. But that's from the standpoint of someone who
does more with computers than 95% of the population. I also thought
it was dumb to dump standard SCSI, and dumb to drop OFW/PPC for,
presumably, a PC BIOS that may or may not support nice features like
mouse-driven FW, netboot, target disk mode, and their plethora of
long-standing startup key combinations. But big companies don't make
computers for people like me, they make them for people who live at
the mall.
A USB to serial device may do the trick but personally, I've never
tried it.
I have a half-broken one, but I'll have to get out the soldering iron
and hack up some old cables to make a functional din-db25 null-modem
cable if I have to.
Hopefully you've tried redownloading and reimaging on a new floppy
diskette.
The 'sum is correct. It could be the floppy, or the fd. I've had
bad floppy problems before.
Walking through the install script manually, it seems to be crashing
at MAKEDEV. When using the install script, it would sometimes crash
at (probably) MAKEDEV, and sometimes during ftp. I think I probably
will need that serial console. Perhaps I have a bad SCSI drive.
I don't have the bandwidth to mess around with multiple/repeated FTP
installs from the internet. It takes too long, so I usually transfer
the files once and then host the FTP locally. It makes installs a lot
easier.
I've been doing that. Well, I did that, found that it crashed sooner
in the process when I did, and then tried FTP to an external site.
If "increased speed" is causing me problems, I'm thinking I may have
a bad disk or main board. Fsck.
If you've got flaky hardware in the SS20, you don't want to use it
as a
replacement for your (currently failing) firewall.
Probably. Well, one crap keyspan USB/serial device and one, possibly
now two crap SS20's has taught me a lesson: for the money, it may be
better to go out and but a cheap sh*t Wal-Mart PC instead of buying
"good" hardware off eBay.
