Hello, sorry for butting in late here, but this keyboard plugging issue has been a pet peeve of mine for quite a while.
> But of course, the best solution to this whole hot-plugging issue is this: > > BUY ANOTHER KEYBOARD OR MOUSE. > > What you would rather do? Buy a $20 keyboard/mouse or a $150+ > motherboard? > > Heck, you can buy cheap 4-port KVMs for under $200 these days too. That argument just doesn't hold in home environments or low-budget colo environments. Myself and pretty much everyone I know have a habit of unplugging and plugging keyboards freely and have done so for years and a multitude of machines, and so far I have never ever heard of it causing hardware problems. The reality is that it is *extremely* annoying when you need physical console access and find yourself dead in the water because apparently the keyboard was disconnected during boot. Whether that is because of some cabling issue, a lack of keyboards, or something else isn't important - it can easily happen at home. And it may very well lead to some database corruption (or what-have-you) if you are forced to do an unclean shutdown. In a colo situation it can be much worse. In order to remedy the situation you need a digital KVM switch since an analog switch is essentially emulating plugging/unplugging quickly rather than acting as an active keyboard for each machine it is connected to. Not only can such a switch cost more than $200 (at least the ones I've seen) - they can also break (which happened to the one and only digital KVM switch I have ever used), and they waste precious rack space. And even with a KVM switch the flexibility of being able to re-arrange cabling is quite useful. Serial redirection is not always an option in a low-budget environment such as personal colo boxes where you try to really press the costs. How many low-budget motherboards have you seen that support console redirection? Not many I would guess. In short - it may seem like a trival problem but it's helluva annoying and can easily lead to serious problems both at home and in colocation environments. I'm very surprised FreeBSD doesn't handle this by default out of the box. -- / Peter Schuller, InfiDyne Technologies HB PGP userID: 0xE9758B7D or 'Peter Schuller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>' Key retrieval: Send an E-Mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.scode.org _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
