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I'm responsible for an old (5-10 yrs?) sun PC providing an important service. However, whenever the keyboard is disconnected, it stops everything it's running (even stops responding to pings), and says "type OK to go" or "type GO to continue" or something like that.

Can it be configured to operate like other OS's that disregard keyboard status?

Thanks!

3 Answers3

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Normally, you have to turn the key to prevent this. Check for the key position.

else: Disabling Sun keyboard abort sequence The default keyboard abort sequence on a Solaris system is sent with the L1-A or STOP-A keys pressed together on an attached Sun keyboard, or the BREAK signal on the serial console.

Inserting or unplugging a keyboard on a running Sun system will also send an abort sequence, effectively dropping you to the Open Boot Prompt ("ok" prompt).

To disable the keyboard abort sequence for the current session: kbd -a disable

To disable the keyboard abort sequence for future sessions (i.e. after a system reboot), change the following in /etc/default/keyboard.

From: #KEYBOARD_ABORT=disable

To: KEYBOARD_ABORT=enable

Mathieu Chateau
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If simply "don't remove the keyboard" is not an option then you used to be able to get little dongles for keyboard ports that the BIOS would see as a keyboard being connected. They were useful for machines that didn't have the option of disabling the on-boot keyboard check. I don't know if you can still get them anywhere but you could probably make one easily enough (IIRC they were nothing more fancy internally than a resistor of the right value between two of the pins.

One thing though: I hope you are not pulling the keyboard out of the machine while it is running. They don't like that. You risk shorting the keyboard controller. I suspect that is why the external keyboard+mouse ports stopped working on a college's laptop at work many years ago. (unless the keyboard is USB or similar, of course, in which case the connector and circuitry around it are designed with hot-plugging in mind).

David Spillett
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You don't say what hardware, or what software. Is there such a thing as a Sun PC?

Anyway, check out /etc/default/kbd in a text editor. There are various switches in there you can use to disable keyboard checks on reboot. If you just want to pull the keyboard while SunOS is running, without rebooting, you can 'kbd -a disable' (iirc, read man page to be sure) and pull the keyboard.

Personally, I'd boot the OS, modify /etc/default/kbd, shut it down, pull the keyboard and cold boot.

I'm kind of surprised you don't have a KVM switch on this.

dr.pooter
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