Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!iuvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!bradley!ninja
From: ninja@bradley.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.att
Subject: Re: Big fun with unix ports
Message-ID: <9300045@bradley>
Date: 9 Jan 88 16:36:00 GMT
References: <301@paisano.UUCP>
Lines: 25
Nf-ID: #R:paisano.UUCP:301:bradley:9300045:000:1334
Nf-From: bradley.UUCP!ninja    Jan  9 10:36:00 1988


The idea of not having a console nearby (either physically or electronically)
sounds unsafe/unwise to me.  Say, one of your machines crashes, then
one more electronically "distant" machine decides to really go out to 
lunch, throws some panics out the console and they are lost forever because
the machine that crashed first still isn't back up yet ("Pick those 
bits up off the floor !!!" (:-).

What I would suggest is, find some cheap AT clone somewhere.  Pack it
with serial ports.  Run unix on it, preferably one with CSH and TIP.
If you don't have or can't get tip, cu should work okay too.
Connect the console of each of your 3B2's to one of these serial ports.
Run tip on each line, and use the job control features of csh to switch
from console to console.  I've seen ports boards for AT's that have
8 serial ports; I don't know what the physical limit is for one (I think
it's 32).  Anyway, I think that's a much better solution than
daisy-chaining your consoles.  The other possibility would be to 
dedicate one of your 3B's to do the same thing.  If you want "hard" logs,
(good idea) you could hack tip/cu on that machine to log them to the printer
and a file for each console.  There's a possibility you could get around
the hacking by using pipes and 'tee' but I don't know if that would work.

Good luck,

Frank McGee