From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Jun 8 16: 9:14 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from speaker.rodsbooks.com (ip68-14-7-118.ri.ri.cox.net [68.14.7.118]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 99E5D37B404 for ; Sat, 8 Jun 2002 16:09:06 -0700 (PDT) Received: by speaker.rodsbooks.com (Postfix, from userid 500) id D17112B80A; Sat, 8 Jun 2002 19:09:01 -0400 (EDT) To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Reply-To: rodsmith@rodsbooks.com Subject: Re: Make a headless box In-Reply-To: <3D015593.9860.1ED8AAD@localhost> Date: Sat, 08 Jun 2002 19:09:01 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: XCmail 1.3 - with PGP support, PGP engine version 0.5 (Linux) X-Mailerorigin: http://www.fsai.fh-trier.de/~schmitzj/Xclasses/XCmail/ MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <20020608230901.D17112B80A@speaker.rodsbooks.com> From: rodsmith@rodsbooks.com (Rod Smith) Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG ---Reply to mail from Corey Snow about Make a headless box > I've got a 486 DX2/66 that I've managed to get bridging with ipfw > between my DSL and LAN. Since I have a bunch of systems and not much > room on the KVM switch, and this is effectively an appliance once > it's tuned properly, I'd like to make it headless- remove the video > and keyboard entirely, making it accessible via ssh or nullmodem only. If you're willing to drop some money on it, one option is the PC Weasel: http://www.realweasel.com This is a card that tells the computer it's a video card, but in fact it has a serial port on it, so you can use any terminal or remote computer as the console. (It also passes through the serial port's input to the keyboard connector.) This can help a lot because it gives you access to the PC's BIOS from the serial console, which is something that a kernel with serial console support can't do. A couple of caveats: First, I've not used this hardware, so I can't say how well it works in practice. Second, although it sounds pretty slick, I'm not sure if it's worth the price ($250 for the ISA version, $350 for the PCI board) for casual use. -- Rod Smith rodsmith@rodsbooks.com http://www.rodsbooks.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message