Funny Serial Bash Issue

[tivo4mevo]

I might have rocks in my head, but for some reason, but serial bash goes funny on my S2 SA.

It's a S2-SA (tcd240080) and I was in the process of re-hacking it. My rc.sysinit.author worked fine for the first boot, but upon a reboot, the serial output displays the boot messages fine until it gets to a certain point and then dots appear and the cursor flies to the right of my minicom.

After futzing with it for a while, I can lower minicom's serial speed from 115200 to 19200, type stty sane, then stype stty 115200, change minicom back to 115200 and all is well.

My rc.sysinit.author is set up to launch serial bash as follows:
exec /bin/bash --login </dev/ttyDSS >/dev/ttyDSS&

And my bootpage reads as follows:
root=/dev/hda4 dsscon=true console=2,115200 updatesoftware=false

I was thinking that it could be my serial cable, but this handcrafted cable has worked on six other S1 & S2 DTivos, and the change in baud rate seems to happen irrespective of whether or not I've got the serial cable connected.

I couldn't find anything in the logs that gave me a direction to look, and my searches of the boards came up empty (mostly S1 stuff about 9600/115200). I'm not sure what would cause the tivo to change from 115200 to 19200 mid boot process.

Any help would be appreciated!

[tivo4mevo]

But my unfamiliarity with the standalone configuration led me to my issue. The tivo was configured to control the Satellite via serial, so the tivo was starting something (midway into the boot) to listen/send on the serial port, and this was resetting the settings.

I'm going to try to fix it by using the IR option instead of serial.

[PlainBill]

root=/dev/hda4 dsscon=true console=2,115200 updatesoftware=false

You might consider changing that to 'upgradesoftware'

PlainBill

[tivo4mevo]

Nice catch! Thanks, Bill.

I think that most of my units have this same error (which percolated through my notes). Luckily most of my units are Dtivo's that aren't connected to a phone line.