Quoted from their website:

"It's an 8-bit ISA board that emulates the original IBM MDA (Monochrome Display Adapter) character-based video board and the PC keyboard. Plugged into an 8-bit or 16-bit ISA slot, it takes the characters written by your CPU into its "video" memory and pumps them out its onboard RS-232 port. Characters input by you into the RS-232 port are converted into keyboard scan codes and presented to the motherboard's keyboard connector.

Whether you're using a dumb terminal next to your computer, dialing in via a modem connected to the PC Weasel's serial port, or on the other side of the world, connecting through an (async) terminal server, your machine will think it has a local keyboard and monitor."

www.realweasel.com

I bought mine for about $250. But I've yet to get it working. I will update this write-up when I get it working and time permits, Insha'Allah.


Several days later and I am almost there. I needed to order a null modem cable from Black Box. Hooked it up to my vt320, and set the communication settings. Plugged one side of the m/m mini-din 6 into my mother board and the other side into my weasel. Booted up and got nothing but garbage to the screen. Put in a video card and went into my bios. Set the video type from VGA to MONO, still garbage. Disconnected the cable and plugged in a standard keyboard and saw my boot messages on my vt320. Input, I need Input!
It seems that if I have the keyboard output from the weasel plugged into the keyboard input of the motherboard on boot up, it freaks all out on me. I tried booting w/o the cable plugged in and everything went fine. I then tried plugging the cable in while the machine was booting, and I got my input. But I have to unplug the cable every time I want to boot the machine. No problem really, since it's a server. Can anyone say "job security".

Except for this slight problem everything went pretty well. The weasel and I are getting along quite well. I did try and contact the company that sold it to me about the problem, but got no response...twice.

It's also described in the user manual as:

"The PC Weasel 2000 is the mutant bastard child of Big Blue, open-source computing, and an inbred mass-murdering hillbilly. Depending on your point of view, it's either: a) a video board with serial output instead of a monitor and a keyboard with serial input instead of keys, or b) a serial board that emulates a video board and a keyboard"

What more could you want? We have several of these and they work great, of course it sucks to have to pay for extra hardware to get basic serial capability that Sun's have had for years, but what can you do...

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