read matches the prompt, i.e., don't wait to get a newline.  With the
new power controller on the rocketport muxes on a pc1500 tipserver,
even though we send two newlines, we just get back a single prompt
with no newline.  This would cause us to hang forever waiting for the
newline.

Note that it did not do this on the same RPCs with the same muxes on
our ops node (a pc3000).  This could be a bad sign for things to come...