[ale] Serial consoles

[Byron A Jeff]

> 
> I would like to run a pc under linux w/o a keyboard connected and without a
> video card and monitor. Will a pc boot correctly without a video card? 

Depends on the BIOS. Most modern ones will ignore both keyboards and video
cards.

>How
> would I redirect the boot messages to a serial port. 

There's a patch. Do this: goto deja news and search for NFS swap for linux.
a recent posting talks about it and gives an FTP site. On that FTP site
there is also a kernel patch for serial boot messages.

>This box will be a
> network server and the video will (hopefully) be unused. Is there a version
> of lilo that would do this? 

There's a patched version of LILO too.

>Thanks for your time.

Well my personal opinion is that it's more effective to put a cheap (like
monochome, Hercules, or CGA) monitor and keyboard because there are too
many possible failure modes on both hardware and booting to trust the serial
port. A keyboard, video card, and monitor can be gotten for the asking because
they are all obsolete. And while the server is running you can disconnect
the keyboard and monitor while leaving the video card in. Then if the
server fails, you don't have to go looking for equipement to hook up just
to debug.

Just my humble opinion....

BAJ