I got one of these dual athlon m/b from tyan (with 2 1.4GHz Athlons and DDR memory -- talk about a sick fast machine) for a client (alas not for me), and it had a feature where you can get the thing to do the post/bios cruft onto the serial port instead of the keyboard/vga port. It did kind of a crappy ncurses type of emulation of the video version, which I thought was a silly waste, but hey. It was extremely handy, and only about 5 years late in coming .... Has anyone noticed that serial concentrators are now more expensive than kvm switches? Sheesh.
a Mark Eichin wrote: > > I've actually got a (PCI) weasel - it's more useful for (1) kernel > development (2) non-sighted (or simply remote!) access to BIOS > settings. It's not nearly as interesting for service oriented > hardware, which you hardly ever reboot, and only need to see the BIOS > when you're right there changing hardware. (and yes, the weasel cost > slightly more than the compgeeks.com celeron box it is installed in :-) > > Don't forget the Intel NS1020 "hosting appliance". Serial BIOS, no > video at all, and a little LCD front panel with a (regrettably > intel-proprietary) UI for setting an initial IP config and root > password. Ships running redhat (2.2.16 kernel), but except for the > front panel, was easy enough to "upgrade" to Debian... [anyone who > actually has one of these boxes and wants it, email me and ask for > debian-upgrade-howto and I'll send the rough draft.] > > On the otherhand, I'd be a customer for a more sane serial bios (the > intel one is still a curses-style text-menus interface) or even an > Intel-based OpenFirmware motherboard :-) > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
