running w/no monitor or keyboard???

I'm been trying to figure this out but thought I'd better ask before I screw up...
I'd like to be able to disconnect the monitor and keyboard from my freebsd systems (2) and just administer them through ssh... I'm running out of space and I have 3 monitors & keyboards tied up on systems that I hardly touch. The problem is I want to be able to plug them back in if I have to... I thought about commenting out the lines in the kernel...
device atkbdc0 at isa? port IO_KBD
device atkbd0 at atkbdc? irq 1 flags 0x1
device psm0 at atkbdc? irq 12
but then I wouldn't be able to plug back in in an emergency? I tried just unplugging but after I powered down the box it hung up on boot with a keyboard error so I had to connect the monitor and keyboard back up?
Is there a way to do this???

Thanks, Terry

Just unplug the monitors, but don't do that to keyboard.

>> and just administer them through ssh

That's what I've been doing. I administer 8 BSD boxes from a M$ box running win98se via SecureCRT. 8 of them are all over my living room plus another box running xp for my visitors. Imagine 9 boxes sharing just 3 monitors Don't forget, you will want to plug the monitor back after buildworld + reboot. I also wouldn't buildworld via ssh client.
BTW, I just finished (spent two days) upgrading my obsd 2.9-current to obsd 3.0-current with ipf. That was a pain in the ***, I should have done a binary upgrade instead.
So really, just don't take out your keyboards.

well looks like I've found a use for my keyboard that the 'P' sticks on finally... out of curiosity how do the isp's do it where you see co-located boxes and servers with no monitors or keyboards???

thanks freebsd!

Terry

BTW did the dvshed webmaster forward an email?

I run 4 FreeBSD boxes without monitors or keyboards. Your bios should have a setting such as "Stop on error" with choices like ALL, KEYBOARD ONLY, and NEVER. If you set it to NEVER (or whatever your bios specifies), it won't hang on boot. Although, I think the ideal way to do it is to use a KVM switch. I run 10 M$ boxes and 9 Unix boxes at work with 1 keybord, mouse, and monitor.

I'll try that after I finish the cvsup I'm running right now on both systems, if not I found an old keyboard that is trashed ( I spilled a drink on it, half the keys don't work), I'll just plug it it... I'm a pack rat, I hardly ever throw anything out, I still have parts from some old 386's! :-)

Thanks, Terry

Have you considered a KVM switch, by chance?

I use a Belkin OmniView SE 4-port kvm to tie together 3 or 4 machines (depends how many I have actually working at one time ;p ), and this particular model is expandable in that you can get additional units and 'daisy-chain' them together to control up to 16 units.

This way I can use one *nice* keyboard, monitor, and mouse to control everything.

HTH,

nuk

>> I'll try that after I finish the cvsup I'm running right now on both systems

You should implement NFS to save some time on that, if both boxes are tracking the same branch.

I run a co-located box that has no monitor, keyboard, mouse, or even a video card ... I know, I am nuts, but I can take care of everything I need to via ssh. I am planning no`make world`s anytime soon, so its all good.

Brett

I don't see reason why remove nor not put the video card in the box. Once, the kernel, ssh or others crashed/die down then you can't ever login in this box so why waste the time to add/remove the video card? I am just curious about what's advantage to remove the video card?

Well, first and foremost I don't have spare video card. More importantly, though, it is colocated locally. I know that guy that runs it, so I have cron going on my home computer that checks the status of the colocated machine. If it ever goes down (which it has once), then all I have to do is call him to restart it. Its not ideal or immediate, but the box isn't critical either. The way I see it, video card or not, I would still have to call the guy to get him to restart it anyway if it ever went down. Did I mention that he's doing this as a favor...yeah, so that means that its free and I really can't ask for too much service wise.

Brett

If you truly do not need a monitor or keyboard on this machine, configure it to boot to and use the serial port as the console. This way you can use ssh for day to day management of the box, but if there is a problem or you need to do a make world and reboot, you can use a laptop or other computer with a terminal emulator connected to com1. I have done this on a pentium machine I use at work for a dedicated server. The process for FreeBSD is detailed on the FreeBSD site. After reconfiguring, I set the bios to boot with no keyboard, restarted and set the machine under my desk. I used ssh to manage it daily, and connected my laptop and TeraTermPro to upgrade the kernel. It worked great.

URL

So you, if you wanted, you could carry around a Psion like the one pictured here:

http://www.ant-computing.com/v0/v0-placement.html

...and just plug it into the serial port (once it is all set up) to administer from?

Brett