Sorry, Linda, sent this straight to you in error... Tom On Thu, 2008-01-10 at 19:16 -0700, Tom Patton wrote:

On Thu, 2008-01-10 at 17:22 -0800, Linda Walsh wrote:

...

Peter Bloomfield suggested minicom (thanks) and Tom Patton wrote:

...

On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 12:46 -0800, Linda Walsh wrote:

...

I have 3 machines in this setup. The setup being: --- ahh...screen or minicom I can probably find documentation on...but the lessons for lizard thing's got me stumped. :-)

Sorry, Linda, it is (I think) in the "books" section under documentation on the 10.3 dvd.

Here's an excerpt:

Procedure This How-To uses standard GNU/Linux commands, therefore it is not specific to openSUSE. Make sure you have screen installed, with: rpm -q screen If not, install it. Fortunately it is included on openSUSE CDs and DVD. The command are very simple: (you must be logged in as root) # screen /dev/ttyS0 or access any other COM port by changing the last digit (0...7). To exit screen use: “ctrl+a”, then “ctrl+\”, “y”.

This was written by; How-To Access COM Port (RS-232 client/server) Alexey Eremenko "Technologov" <al4321@gmail.com>

There is also a section on the method to set up grub to ship the start-up messages out the tty port.

I used to do something similar, in that I had a headless old pc as a modem "gateway" for the home network, and the only way to recover a boot failure was via the reset button and a tty to see what was happening.

One other thing, if the bios supports "Kiosk" mode, you don't need a mouse or kboard, either. I think most modern pc's will roll over that anyway, but they used to hang forever without a keyboard.

Tom

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