[geeks] Connecting two computers with serial cables - do you have to have two cables?

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Jonathan Groll <lists at groll.co.za>
>Date: 2007/08/13 Mon AM 07:00:24 CDT
>To: geeks at sunhelp.org
>Subject: [geeks] Connecting two computers with serial cables - do you have to have two cables?

>I would like to connect two computers together by serial cable, since
>these machines are running headless on my bookshelf, the idea behind
>using the serial cables is to offer an emergency login prompt to each
>machine should things go wrong. 
>
>So each machine will be running a serial getty. The problem is that the
>device is locked by the getty process (at least under linux), so trying
>to launch minicom to see the other machine over the same cable results
>in "/dev/ttyS0 is locked". Is it really necessary to have two cables to
>connect two machines in this manner?

Maybe I'm just being thick, but can't you run getty on both serial connections (one per machine), and then when machine "a" hangs, you would kill getty on machine "b" and fire up minicom?

That *should* work, but I've never done anything like it, so there may be obvious issues I'm overlooking...

Lionel