*BSD News Article 57562


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From: fzshenau@boris.ucdavis.edu (Gregory Shenaut)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc
Subject: Re: BSDI booting without a keyboard
Date: 22 Dec 1995 00:27:00 GMT
Organization: University of California, Davis
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Brian Kantor (brian@nothing.ucsd.edu) wrote:
: I have a bunch of BSDI systems that share a keyboard and monitor via a
: switchbox.  Most of these do not have any serial ports.  By putting
: 	-console kbd
: into /etc/boot.default, I've been able to get them to boot reliably even
: when the keyboard is switched off to another system.

: However, once they've done that, switching the keyboard back doesn't
: work - it's completely ignored.  It appears (in /sys/i386/isa/pccons.c)
: that the keyboard gets configured whether it responds or not, so I
: don't quite know what's going on here.

I once did a similar thing, and found that it was necessary for the
keyboard to be *reset* because of switch glitches.  What I did was to
skip a position on the switch between each position that I used.  So if
I switched between, say, position 1 and position 3, while the switch
was in position 2 the keyboard was powered down; when it gets to
position 3, it powered up once again & (almost always) worked, unless I
turned the switch selector too fast.  There are also fancy switches
that look like a keyboard to the computers and which perform the
switching using active circuitry, so that the keyboard and computers
never "know" that they have been switched--if I have to do this gain,
I'll just buy one of these devices.

--
Greg Shenaut -- gkshenaut@ucdavis.edu