On Mon, Jun 11, 2001 at 09:04:39AM -0400, Steven Grunza wrote:

> I've almost been in a similar situation but managed to avoid it.  The 
> solution I was going to try was to either have a serial console (an old 
> 8086 laptop no one in their right mind would take) or a special piece of 
> hardware to reboot the box.  The special piece of hardware would have been 
> either an 8051 type of microcontroller that knew how to go through an 
> authentication procedure with a serial port and reboot the box or a really 
> simple switch that fired off an interrupt to an otherwise unused comm or 
> parallel port.  The really simple design requires some customization of the 
> associated driver, mostly to initiate a reboot instead of the normal 
> interrupt processing.

I've been thinking about using the serial port. Designing a new
hardware peripheral wouldn't be a good idea. But I have been thinking
about ataching a mouse to it. Then, I would simply modify moused to
catch mouse buttons and make it call 'halt' or 'reboot'.

I don't think it will be very difficult, cos it will be useful.

What do you think?

P.S. Note that I don't need high security in this way, because the
router is acting at home... so no need to worry.

> > >
> > > --
> > > David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net -->
> > > All this stuff in twice the space would only look half as bad!
> > >                                             - me