*Other People's Hardware

Andrew Brown on Tyan motherboards:

From: Andrew Brown iloveweasels@graffiti.com
Date: Mon 6/3/2002 16:59:50
Subject: saved MY ass

I was setting up a beefy server to do repetitive unattended builds of large amounts of software -- dual CPUs, tons of RAM, disk space, etc. The board I picked had a "serial console BIOS" so that I could, or so I thought, tweak the machine remotely. It turned out to be almost unusable and it required that the operating system also know about serial consoles. It was hard to change things in the BIOS, and hard to get out of the BIOS once you were done.

Then I got a weasel and turned off the serial console BIOS. It was the happiest day of my life. It rocked!

I powered on the machine and the serial console came to life. Colors! Features! Abilities! No operating system support required! It can even redraw the screen.

Now the machine sits and hums along quite happily. If it gets stuck, as machines are sometimes wont to do, I can reset it *remotely* using the Weasel -- something the BIOS would never be able to do.

"I love my Weasel." -- Paul Vixie