General Questions

quick question.  I'm pretty sure the answer is no but just want to confirm.  I have an ASUS VH236H monitor.  This monitor does NOT allow me to fix which video source it stays on.  I have two systems connected to this monitor, my main system on the DVI port and my monowall box on the VGA port.  My issue is when my main system turns off the display (windows 7) after 20 minutes, the monitor automatically switches to the VGA video source which is my monowall box.  The problem with this is that the monowall console is now always on my LCD screen (thus never actually sleeping the monitor) because the monitor switches to the VGA source.  I have asked ASUS support to see if there was a way to tell the monitor to ONLY use the DVI port (my previous samsung was able to do this but I could not figure out for the life of me how to do this with the ASUS monitor.)  Turns out there is no way to do this.  My current solution is to just unplug the VGA connection which now keeps the monitor on the DVI video source, thus blacking out my monitor until I touch a key or move my mouse.  Now for my quick question (ok, maybe not so quick), is there a way to have the monowall video source "go to sleep" if you will, such that it turns off the display after X amount of minutes or seconds?

I did some quick research and apparently there are some ways to do this in freebsd.  Do you think this could make it into one of the builds for monowall?  Obviously my usage of this is for a very specific need.  I honestly can't think of very many other uses for this especially since monowall is typically only meant for embedded devices anyway.  Truth be told this would be an odd feature to incorporate into a base build but just thought I'd throw the question out there and see if it is currently possible?

Thanks very much!

I am much to freebsd illiterate to be able to use one of the below methods to incorporate it into my monowall box.

http://www.freebsd.org/projects/acpi/

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/laptop/power-management.html

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=32193.0

A lot of things are possible if one is willing to modify the m0n0wall image and accept the increased size of the image.

My suggestion is an inexpensive KVM switch. Its what I do here.

Why use a monitor on monowall ?  Once the system is configured, there is little use for it. As the webui is the main interface. You could consider using a serial cable as the next release 1.33 has a generic-pc image with serial console like embedded.

thanks for the replies.  I tried the new v1.33b2 image with serial (generic-pc-serial) but couldn't get it working.  probably a mixture of the crappy USB to serial adapter I have on my windows 7 64bit system in addition to the serial connection that I have on the monowall box... never used it before so unsure if it ever worked.  I tried all different BIOS configurations for the serial port but no success.  I was using Putty as my terminal of choice and tried many differnet configurations.  I was able to "connect" (ie: it brought up the terminal window" but tried pressing Enter and many other buttons and nothing ever came on the screen except black.  Did a quick search in the monowall forum and freebsd forums but nothing.  Settings I used 9600:8:no parity:1:no flow control.  I may attempt some other time.  Thanks for the recommendation, I may look into the KVM switch.