Specifications

©
2002, David K. Z. Harris
28
Pg. 28
© 2002
David K. Z. Harris
Is Serial BREAK a problem?
Ø The answer varies, site to site
Ø The answer today may change in
a year, or a month.
² Corporate acquisitions and mergers
² Strategic Partnership networks
² “Visiting Hardware” for developers
Ø More information is available on
www.conserver.com
Older SUN hardware is vulnerable. So are older SGI IRIX machines. Newer
SUN machines can be patched and modified. Modems may react badly to
BREAK, depending on their configuration. Some telecom test gear is rebooted,
and setting reverted by serial BREAK.
Newer console servers don’t cause this problem. I’ve been testing a variety of
terminal server and console server hardware, to see which devices send Serial
BREAK without the operators instructions. You can find the testing results on
http://www.conserver.com/consoles/breakoff.html.
If you only have one or two devices that are susceptible to BREAK, you may
be able to connect them with Nu-Data Cisco Serial interfaces (cost is ~$100 per
port). If you have more than a dozen ports to protect, you should consider
purchasing a Console Server that won’t send BREAK unless you tell it to.
Sun has fixes available (patches and work-arounds) for more recent versions of
Solaris. You may need access to SunSolve