Re: More BCP: revenge of RS232 and CLIs

["Joel N. Weber II" <ietf-opsec@joelweber.com>]

I'm a little skeptical that being able to change the baud rate is
really beneficial.  It seems like if the console port is always at a
fixed speed, there's less worrying about whether I'm seeing nothing on
the console port because this sparcstation 1 my friend gave me is
actually dead, or if it's just at a weird baud rate for some strange
reason.  And I've generally found in-band management to be a good
option for day to day work when the extra speed can be nice.

A way to reset the device's communications parameters on its primary
management interface may be worth mandating.  It may be that sending a
break to a serial port is a valid way to do that that doesn't require
building more hardware.

I think we should consider mandating that it MUST be possible to
configure a network device by plugging its serial port into a terminal
whose display understands the 95 printing ASCII characters, carriage
return, newline, bell, and backspace.  A device MAY send terminal
control commands that assume a more advanced terminal, such as a
vt100, in response to the user sending commands to the device, such as
control characters to edit the command line, as long as it is still
possible to completely configure the device from a terminal which does
not support these features.