It must not be his area of expertise

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

It was a busy day today and I almost got everything done I wanted to today—the only thing I didn't get done was configuring the Cisco router that was on my desk, because I can't get into the device to configure it. It's not that my serial port doesn't work—rebooting my workstation seems to have fixed that problem—it's got a password on there that I don't have.

I've tried following the recovery procedure but I don't get the rommon prompt, but something that appears to be even lower, like a simple resident debugger where you can change CPU registers, flip bits in memory and set breakpoints.

That's not rommon.

I called G, our Cisco consultant about the problem. “Did you press Ctrl-Break?” he asked.

“No, that does nothing,” I said, hitting Ctrl-Break repeatedly. “I'm not using Windows, G.”

“Oh, that's right,” he said. “You use that Linux stuff.”

“So what does Ctrl-Break actually send?” I asked. “I can then get minicom to send it.”

“Um,” said G, “I don't know what it sends.”

Sigh.

A Ph.D, and he works with computer communications for a living, and he doesn't know what Ctrl-Break under Windows send.

Sigh.

I suspect that it sends a BREAK character (which isn't a character per se but a condition created on a serial line) and that's what I'm sending from minicom and getting dumped into this debugging monitor.

“Can you hook it up to a Windows box?” asked G.

I took one look at the only Windows box in The Office, which is in Smirk's office. “Nope. But I'll take it home and try it there.” I have access to some Windows boxes at home, and I figure I can humor G here.