serial cables make joey crazy

I hate serial ports. I wish they'd just go away, like they have from the back of $CURRENT_LAPTOP. Unfortunatly nearly all my d-i test automation work ends up involving serial consoles and so I've had to mess with them more in the past few months than I have in many years.

Today a nice pa-risc machine arrived which will be the next one I automate. Unfortunlty its console is serial, and I am getting pretty maxed out on serial ports on my servers. I tried setting up a chain of db25 to null modem to gender changer to db9 to the hppa, but this failed to work for some unknown reason and would have been temporary anyway.

So I had to set up an old digi portserver 16 for it instead. This involved hand wiring rj45 to db6 converters, and I still haven't gotten it quite right, since ethernet patch cables do not work, but if I use a phone cable (4 wires less), I get at least a basically usable connection. Thanks to William for suggesting I try a phone cable. I suppose this means I got the 4 missing lines wrong somehow, even though I followed digi's documentation. Their "altpin" stuff is confusing.

Anyway, after I got that set up and fought with the digiserver command line for a few hours, and got it set up, I finally have a login to the new box's management console. That was too hard, ethernet has spoiled me for simple cables that just work, with nice features like connection status and autosensing.

I won't be suprised if automating the whole rest of the debian auto-install is quicker than getting the serial console hooked up.