telnet-only linux box

[Steve Cohen <stevecoh mcs com>]

I've set up a newly made linux box out of an "old" PC that was gathering
dust.  It's only role in life will be to monitor a serial port and route
the input from it to a couple of places.  It really doesn't need a
monitor, keyboard, or mouse.  The monitor and the mouse we've done away
with:  however we need the keyboard to log in the first time.  After
that, we can log in via telnet and do whatever maintenance needs to be
done which isn't going to be much.  

Can't we get rid of the keyboard too?  What kind of initialization does
such a system require to allow it to be logged into remotely without
having first been logged into locally?  The initialization scripts are
straight out of the box Redhat.