It must not be his area of expertise

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 [1]—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 [2] 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 (Central Processing Unit) 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 (Philosophiæ Doctor), 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 [3], and I figure I can humor G here.

=> [1] /boston/2006/09/27.1 | [2] http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/routers/ps259/products_tech_note09186a0080094a0b.shtml | [3] http://saltmine.pickint.net/2006/09/26.1

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