[Soekris] comBIOS update failure; connected but can't upload. help?

[Bill Maas]

On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 20:46 -0700, snowcrash+soekris wrote:
> hi david,
> 
> > I see this question on the list fairly often.  I updated the
> > information at my Ultradesic page.  Take a look at the updated
> > information and see if that solves your problem.
> 
> thanks.  i'll take a look asap.
> 
> atm, i've got another problem ... in testing, i tried setting soekris
> baud rate to 38400.  it took, but after reboot, i get just garbage ...
>  can't connect cleanly at any baud rate.
> 
> &, i can't seem to figure out how to reset to factory defaults.  :-(
> 
> any hints would be appreciated ... while i slog away at it.
> 
> thanks again.

Hello snowcrash,

there are in fact serial port baud rate 4 settings to be considered if
you are booting off CF (an NFS boot makes things a bit easier):
- soekris BIOS
- terminal program
- boot loader
- kernel

So before you decide to change the serial port baud rate on a Soekris,
you should really think things trough, as I myself have experienced in
the past. Order matters here! In fact, I had exactly the same problem a
few years ago. Note that every element listed above must support the new
baud rate. PXElinux for example doesn't work well at 38400, if I
remember it correctly (or was it minicom? - I forgot. The point being
there's a chain of stuff that can go wrong).

There's no "reset to factory defaults" button on a soekris as far as I'm
aware of. I just booted the thing, ignored the garbage, pressed ^P and
blind typed "set ConSpeed=19200", followed by a "reboot" (not unlike
typing "reset" on a messed up terminal). After that, everything worked
well again. Not a very elegant solution, I admit.

Bill

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"Incompetence is our watchword" - John Peel