Igor Vilensky wrote: > I don't believe BIOS is at fault. I do believe you are wrong.
> I could not find anything vaguely related > in BIOS settings, now, I'm even more sure you are wrong. look again. Oh, depending on the vintage, you may not have ANY BIOS settings there -- you may have to install them to the hard disk. However, the PII Compaqs I can think of did have ROM-based BIOS setup programs (yay). The disk-based ones were a pain in the butt when someone zeroed the entire drive before you try to install an OS. > plus, > I booted machine with Knoppix boot cd and have been able to ping it for > hours on end. wow, different results from a different OS? Whoda thunk? > Rather strange. Not at all, at least if you have had problems with Compaq machines of that vintage shutting themselves off because the BIOS thinks it is doing you a favor, as it hadn't noticed any BIOS calls for various functions in a while. You have to disable the power management on these machines, or they do exactly what you report. It is probably a bug, OpenBSD could probably do something to disable that "feature" of the BIOS, but as I tend to use these things for applications where I'd never want them to turn off, I always disable power managment in the BIOS, in case the OS I just installed didn't handle THAT particular BIOS "properly". Well...almost always, otherwise, I'd not know about this issue. :) Nick.
