Solaris 2.6 / 2.7 keyboard abort sequence

If you've got a couple of Solaris machines but only one keyboard.

By default the Solaris OS will halt if you unplug the keyboard, to stop it doing this you need to edit a file called. /etc/default/kbd

There is a line in there that by default will look like this:

#KEYBOARD_ABORT=enable

You need to uncomment this and change it to disable:

KEYBOARD_ABORT=disable

This will then let you unplug the keyboard and plug it back in without halting the system. It will bleep at you when you plug it back in. One other thing to note when doing this is that if you reboot the box without the keyboard in then it assumes a slightly different keyboard layout. The most noticeable effect is that the arrow keys are not available to use in vi, so you'll have to revert to the old-fashioned h,j,k and l keys.

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