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Administration of headless machines can be a pain, and working on multiple machines can also be a bit of a bother. KVM boxes solve some of the problem, but sometimes finding a keyboard and a monitor to lug around to these machines is most of the problem. Is there a portable solution that might solve both of these problems? Wouldn't it be nice to carry around a specialized laptop that could act as both a portable display and input device? Does something like this currently exist? KJH1138 asks: "I am looking for a hardware/software combination that would allow me to use my laptop as the KVM for a headless server before, during, and after OS configuration. What I have in mind would be a server KVM/USB to laptop serial/USB connection, with software on the laptop to provide KVM control of the headless device, with or without an OS. A PC Anywhere or Linux equivalent wouldn't work since they would require the headless system to already have an installed OS. I would prefer a Linux-based solution on the laptop, but would settle for a Windows option. I simply don't want the clutter of a keyboard and monitor."

PGillingwater has a similar desire: "Like many regular readers, sometimes I need to visit a customer site to diagnose equipment, like firewalls or routers. More systems these days use VGA output and keyboard input, which means having to scrounge a display and keyboard, then looking for a spare power socket in the machine room, which is not always easy! I am wondering if anyone has seen a laptop which also allows VGA input and keyboard output. This would be a cool idea. Use it as a normal laptop most of the time, then hijack the video and keyboard to connect to other systems when you need it."

PGillingwater writes "Rob Lineweaver has written a concise summary of how much it would cost (and the savings that can be achieved) to set up the (almost) complete infrastructure in the Harrisonburg City Public Schools. He estimates that using commercial packages instead of open source would have cost the K12 schools an extra $27,000 in software license costs. More interestingly, he states that this is not only about cost. He says: 'This makes it apparent that not all of the benefit of open source software deployment in is the form of cost savings; much of the benefit is in terms of capabilities gained. In other words, through the use of free software, I am able to do more within my budget than I could if I only had commercial solutions available.'"

PGillingwater writes: "Whilst configuring access control lists on our Cisco router today, I noticed a very large amount of traffic coming in on UDP port 137, to many different addresses within our Class B range. They seemed to be coming also from a range of addresses outside, with no obvious pattern. Further investigation showed that most of those incoming packets originated from Web servers running IIS version 4. This suggests that our users are sending an HTTP GET request on port 80, and the IIS server immediately responds with a UDP NetBIOS reply packet to port 137/UDP, probably as some sort of attempt to find the NetBIOS name, or maybe some form of RPC authentication service. Inquiring minds want to know! Does it strike anyone as unusual that HTTP has been "extended" in this way by Microsoft? Naturally, we're blocking it, but I'm curious as to what the IIS server does with this information, and just how much does it expose security-related information of sites that don't block those ports." Can anyone else validate this behavior, and/or offer up guesses as to the reasons behind it?