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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

Does your Sun keyboard have a "Stop" key? I seem to remember that for about 99% of the Sun machines I encountered hitting "Stop A" was pretty obnoxious.

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What's even more fun is that depending on your LOM configuration -removing- the keyboard can send a Stop-A.

This is not entirely hilarious when a junior sysadmin 'tidies up' the keyboards connected to the main database server (and even further from funny when the slave is currently down for maintenance ...)

The serial terminals did that as well and you couldn't unconfiure it on early sun4 prom revisions. You could get around it by using a rs232 breakout box with a resistor soldered in it and then screw that box to the back of the unit. That was standard practice. I remember when sysadmins were good with a soldering iron...

Yes, all those extra keys work with OpenSolaris and OpenIndiana. Alas, they don't produce any scan codes with Linux. They are located in a separate area on the left, so they don't disturb your workflow.

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19683-01/806-6642/images/BR.unix....

They seem to work fine with RHEL 5 and Sun Type 6 keyboards. We do this at work on our systems. We just remap the keycodes to F keys. Something like xmodmap -e 'keycode 232 = F13' for the Stop key.

That's probably because I'm using Sun Type 5 with mini-din convertor to USB. Under OpenIndiana these keys work fine, but aren't working on Linux. Must be some driver specifics. Type 6 and Type 7 work better indeed, but they are not so ergonomic as Type 5 for some reason.

It was also the quickest way to get root. Stop-a would drop you into the monitor, then b -s to boot into single user mode. Congratulations, you are root, now just edit /etc/passwd to put in a new user "toor" with uid 0, and reboot into multiuser mode.

That didn't work for us a we netbooted everything off an e1000 and used the local disk for swap only.

I still had the e1000 (and disk array) which was skip dived until last year but the wife made me get rid of it :( She didn't want that kind of coffee table...

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