We’ve been big fans of the PC Weasel for a long time. We wrote up an article about them back in 2001. At that time, though, you couldn’t purchase their product easily, and they hadn’t finished their PCI version. Well, it looks like you can purchase the PCI version online now. The PC Weasel lets you fully administer your x86 box via a serial port. The keyboard and VGA is rerouted to the serial port so that you can tweak the BIOS. They also connect their board up to reset. Very nice if you can’t afford the HP and IBM remote management boards (which are dreamy, but spendy). PC Weasel even lets you test out their product via telnet on a NetBSD box they have set up. As a final fun tidbit, they made their firmware opensource. You can use gcc to recompile the firmware to your liking and re-flash the board. Doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fuzzy?
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