Hi there.  I hope this gets the right people to ask this question.

   I have a NetBSD 3-ish system at home, with a serial console,  
connected to a Cisco console server.  But, I don't have anything  
constantly managing that console port.  I've noticed that when I boot  
that machine without anything attached to the Cisco console port, it  
will drop into the prompt in the MBR system, and not continue until I  
initialize the serial console connection and tell it to boot.

   Is this normal?  Is there a way to avoid it?  I intend to ship out  
an old 486 system in the near future that will have a 100%  (okay,  
99%) unmanaged serial console.  The console will be there if I need  
to talk to it, but it will be at a remote site with no management  
infrastructure, and I hope to let it "just keep ticking" as much as  
possible, so this issue concerned me some.

   Anyone familiar with this issue?  Anyone have any suggestions?   
Thanks much...

                            - Chris