On Sat, 4 May 2002, Greg A. Woods wrote:

I haven't got a lot of experience but the Dell's seem to work OK.

I agree though that the PC world has a LONG ways to go before it gets
into the realm of the traditional unix vendors.

We can thank Windows NT for a lot of this.  Hard to believe that the
people behind that OS had experience with server level OS's.  Leave's
them with no excuse in my mind.  All that GUI only stuff was an obvious
dead-end from a scalability POV.

> 
> I've also tried the PHOENIX ServerBIOS as found on the Intel STL-2
> motherboard.  It's totally unusable -- and a really bad hack too:  it
> just re-paints the whole screen continusouly translating what it
> believes the video character map to look like into a stream of ASCII
> that it tries to spew out the serial port.  It's impossible to even boot
> without at least a 38.4kbps local connection with zero latency and a PC
> as a terminal emulator.  It's also seriously FUBAR w.r.t. the baseboard
> management controller console interface for remote management (though
> maybe not quite so FUBAR as the Compaq variety of the same).
> 
> There's absolutely no sane comparison possible between these horrid
> hacks and anything usable, such as a Sun, or a DEC SRM console, etc.
> 
> 

-- 
Mike Miller             mke @ turbolift.com