This is easily done by running mgetty on the port. Note that booting your computer keyboard-less can be a problem. Many systems will hang in the BIOS POST if they can't sense the keyboard is present. On some systems this can be turned off in the BIOS setup. This has nothing to do with linux. I believe you can buy little plugs which go in the keyboard connector which will make the system think there's a keyboard present.
I also found that I had to modify the kernel source to get linux to boot without a keyboard but this was with a 2.0.X (where X == I don't remember what) in order to get it to work because there was some startup assembly code which was making a call to clear the keyboard buffer and it would cause the system to hang (or crash, can't remember which). Hopefully this is alleviated in more recent kernels. Serial console support should be set up in your kernel config (you're going to need to compile your own kernel) and lilo can be set up for serial console support as well. Good luck, Dinesh Nadarajah wrote: > Hi: > > I am trying to setup several linux systems that I > would like to administer over a network and/or via the > serial port. The serial port based admin. is important > in some cases when network is down etc. Is there any > way of running a Kermit like program to connect to a > linux box through COM ports and login to the system. > This feature (Monitor less, keyboard less, mouse less) > operation is available on IRIX, AIX and Solaris. There > there a similar service I can run in linux. > > Thanks in advance. > > -Dinesh -- Jens B. Jorgensen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
