George Toft wrote:
> I had 8 boxes, 2 keyboards, 1 monitor.
> That's what ssh is for.

But ... OK, maybe I've been too corrupted
by Windows, so I can't trust a box to
consistently boot all the way up to
sshd and be accessible via the LAN.

So George, honestly, how often has one of
your video-less boxes had some sort of
network or boot-up problem that required you
to hook up a keyboard and monitor to do
some repairs?

I remember when the architects of a Honeywell
mainframe back in the early '80's had to tell
the logic designers that there would be NO
blinkenlights.  They were used to having all
the CPU registers displayed in binary, and now
they were going to debug using the console.

... of course in that case, it happened that
they had all the flops chained together as
a big ol' shift register, and a separate
service processor that could read or set
anything in the system while it was halted.

A Linux box doesn't have any of that; it just
has to wait till the network comes up, and
then trust that the expected IP is answering.
With my luck (or lack of admin skills), I'd be
struggling to switch a video cable to a
different box a few times a week.

Vic