wherefore art thou, oh tty01? (COM2 on 6386E/33)

[Dr. Scump]

Here there be Wierdness:

In setting up the second of our 6 6386E/33s, I ran into a very
confusing problem.  I can't get the alternate console feature to work
on one of the two machines; on the other, it works just dandy.

On the problem machine, if I switch to alternate console (per TFM
instructions: define COM2CONS, idbuild, confgls -a 1 -b 9600, reboot),
the machine *hangs* on reboot.  If I leave the monitor connected, all
the diagnostics show up on both the monitor and the terminal hooked
to COM2, then as soon as UNIX boots, the monitor goes blank (normal
behavior) and nothing comes up on the terminal anymore (definitely
NOT normal).  The machine hangs; I know this because the other
terminals never come up, so I know it's not just that the messages
aren't showing up on the console terminal.  I reboot, boot a copy
of the kernel from before the COM2CONS definition, and switch back
to normal console setup.

Again, the whole alternate console bizniss works fine on the other
machine.

The machines are identically equipped with two exceptions:
   1) the problem machine is using a bus master disk controller.
      the controller (Consensys PowerStor) works just dandy otherwise.

   2) SOMEHOW, tty01 never got defined.  There is no tty01 in /dev,
      and the sdevice file has only the one async entry.  This is the
      real wierdness, as the hotline people insist that it should be
      automatically defined.  Nothing went haywire while installing
      the foundation set.

For now, I'm going to try establishing that missing tty01 via FACE
and try again.  Anybody got any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

--
Alan S. Denney # Informix # aland at informix.com # {pyramid|uunet}!infmx!aland
 CAUTION: Objects in terminal are closer than they appear...
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