On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 09:50:59PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 09:11 +0000, Jonathan McDowell wrote:
Yup. Most modern server motherboards have the option to do that anyway these days, if they're anyway decent.
It's always been a weakness of the X86 platform, it was never designed to be a server platform from the outset and so therefore lacks some of the better management features like this in the core design.
It's getting better with things like IPMI, but I still find that not well documented and it tends to want custom software to work.
Actually most of the legacy server platforms (Sparc, Alpha and I think Mips) have a serial pre-boot console and have had since the dawn of time.
Even Apple managed to make the PowerPC based Macs support it as part of OpenFirmware. Plus they all had line based interfaces, which are much more sensible over a serial console than some menu driven constantly updating thing.
J.