Re: [spam score 5/10 -pobox] draft-jones-opsec-01.txt comments

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

> >  It's hard to do logging and time sync well
> > across a traditional serial console port.
>
> Time synch, I'll give you....but I've seen ASR33s, DECWriters and old
> PCs hooked up to serial lines that do a fine job of logging on
> serial interfaces.

hmm, I'm not sure exactly what I was thinking when I said that.

one problem is that to do logging well, you need a separate port.

for a while I had a router (a cisco 2611) set up to log (via syslog
over ethernet) every packet it dropped.  if I'd had that going to the
console port, it would have been a mess whenever I wanted to see what
I was doing while using the console port to configure the device.

yes, the router has an aux port as well, but I was using that for a
modem for an extra out of band management option.

I'm also not sure you could guarentee that a serial port would be able
to keep up with the log messages that might be generated in that usage
mode.

And thinking about things, I realized that if you have enough serial
ports, there are protocols for doing time sync over serial; this is
how people hook up their GPS when they want the clocks on their
network sync'd to GPS.

But I don't think I've ever heard of anyone synchronizing lots of
individual computers' clocks to GPS using a serial port on every
computer.