> You were lucky, it's like forgetting to look when you cross the road. > Getting away with it once doesn't mean it is safe. > > Yes, I have blown a UART chip by hotplugging a serial cable, because I'd > got away with it before.
I must have hot plugged serial connections on Sun, Cisco and Intel boxes hundreds of times over the years and as far as i know have never seen a failure. Typically, the same device would be hot plugged multiple times so failures would have been noticed. I consider the risk to be negligible.
