Re: [Sheflug] headless

[Alex Hudson <nospam [at] alexhudson.com>]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2001 at 08:27:17PM +0000, Chris J/#6 wrote:
> Take a gander at this ... dunno how much it costs, but looks a nice toy to 
> run a pure headless box off serial console :)
> 	http://www.realweasel.com/intro.html

I remember there have been discussions about this kind of thing before - I believe there is a SF project to bring up a serial line during boot, for example. Not sure that you need 'big hardware' (I see at least one ASIC and four memory chips - this is probably a computer on a board) to shift bytes. I certainly think it would be cheaper to hire a programmer to decompile the BIOS and modify it (probably not very hard).

I'm afraid these guys also get marks knocked off for using 'pluralize ($word) { return $word.'en'; }', which annoys me so much it's not true. It's "boxes", and "BIOS'", etc., and I'm not sure what to make of their 'open source' claim either... ho hum :))

The only problem with serial consoles, as I see it, is that you really need a serial server to take advantage of them, and 16-port IO cards (for example) cost a heck of a lot for what they are. Plus, software support is generally pretty awful. 

Cheers,

Alex.

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