On Wed, Sep 27, 2000 at 11:06:13AM +0100, Scott Telford wrote:

 > Intel do a 1U server called the ISP1100 which claims to have a BIOS with
 > "LAN/serial console redirection". I believe this is OEM'd by various
 > vendors.
 > 
 > See http://www.intel.com/network/products/isp1100.htm.

Yah ... we have one 1U model like this, and it works pretty well.  If
it's the same one we have (which looking at the web page, I think it
is), then we actually had to go out and buy a cheap PCI VGA card to
get a graphics console when we decided to put it in the devel lab :-)

In any case, serial console works well on them from the BIOS, but
you need to install a NetBSD boot block which is hard-wired to
com0 in order for it all to work properly.  This is because the BIOS
takes the serial port its using for console redirection out of the
list of available serial ports, so when the boot block queries it,
it gets the next one (com1).

As for how well it works, I'm currently using it as a build server,
and it's been up for over 100 days now (since the last time I upgraded
the kernel on it) doing more-or-less constant builds of our source tree.

In the end, we decided to go with the 2U systems (ISP2100) mostly
because we liked the idea of having the SCA disk backplane, and we
needed 3 disks for RAID-5 (along with 1 to boot from :-)

-- 
        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@zembu.com>