I've got serial consoles on several i386 machines running 1.3.2,
and after a certain amount of time, the machines begin behaving
strangely... any process which wants to write to the console (via syslog,
for example) hangs, because there's nothing plugged into that serial port.

Now, I did see the thread regarding this on this list a few weeks ago,
but I'm not sure I ever saw the recommended fix for this... that is,
I know keeping something plugged into the serial port works around this,
but for various reasons, that's not feasible here.  How can I get the
serial console to completely ignore DTR (as I *think* that's what the
issue is here), and just write to the serial port regardless of anything
being plugged in?  I tried adding the following to the kernel config, 
without apparent success:

options         "CONSDEVNAME=\"com\"",CONADDR=0x3f8,CONSPEED=9600
options         CONMODE=0x0000cb00

... that is, I get the same behaviour.  So, is this a kernel issue, or
is there something I need to tweak in the bootblocks?  (Apart from
changing CONSDEV_PC to CONSDEV_COM0 in main.c?)

Thanks in advance,
+j

-- 
Jeff Rizzo                                         http://boogers.sf.ca.us/~riz