Careful on this. There are a number of systems out there (Sun's in particular) that equate toggling on the serial line to a halt/shutdown command. Imagine your surprise when you reboot your cheap terminal server only to discover your vendors routers/switches/BSD-based load balancers/etc. employ this feature too...Ughh.
you'd think i'd know by now that powercycling one particular box of mine will always kill the egress router. i never learn. it took me about a year of "wtf?!" to actually get used to remembering that powercycling the box with the serial console on it will send a "break" to the router and i need to boot as fast as possible, tip in, and "c" it. later i just pulled the cable off. it was easier and i ended up accessing the router less than i was rebooting it because i hadn't recalled yet exactly what i'd done wrong. brain slow. but i can also appreciate the statement from the angle of one who plugs and unplugs sun keyboard cables as well: that's also a break signal. at least...until we upgraded to e450s and left the keys (removed, but) in the locked position so that the machine would ignore the standard set of break signals. -- |-----< "CODE WARRIOR" >-----| codewarrior@daemon.org * "ah! i see you have the internet twofsonet@graffiti.com (Andrew Brown) that goes *ping*!" andrew@crossbar.com * "information is power -- share the wealth."