Proper Serial Console Support 143
I snarfed this from Daily DaemonNews, and it's very cool. If you administer a bunch of PC Unix servers (BSD, Linux, whatever) you probably miss the serial console that proper servers have. Once the OS is booting you can get serial output, but that doesn't help for modifying the BIOS. For that you need a monitor and keyboard. Enter the PC Weasel, an ISA board that pretends to be an MDA card, but actually stuffs the display out a serial port, and takes keyboard input and plugs it in to the keyboard buffer. So no need for a monitor now, just a serial connection. Probably the best thing is that if you buy one, you automatically get a source license for the microcontroller code, so you can customise it all you want.
No watchdog timer? (Score:1)
Re:Actually, PCI *is* Needed! (Score:1)
you tell that bad mammajamma! (Score:1)
I guess it must suck to work for you.
LOL!! He must be one of those Satanist Canadians. Observe the Canadian lifestyle in the rewrite of Oscar-nominated song from South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut:
"Blame Canada" Lyrical Rewrite
by Trey Parker
Canada is full of faggots,
Greasy hair that's full of maggots,
Gay little boys and girls just whackin'
off while men go lumberjackin'!
Go fuck your mom because she's loose,
Or maybe make love to a moose!
Blame Canada, Blame Canada,
Not even a real country anyway.
Thank you.
Note: This post has been moderated down by Satanist Canadian moderators in other discussions. Please, Satanist Canadians: return to your homes and commence making love to bottles of maple syrup.
- Jesus Christ
(#154953, account temporarily disabled for being moderated down)
I am the Lord.
God Hates Moderators.
Re:My thoughts (Score:1)
openbios ? (Score:1)
Serial console support is on the wishlist (URL:http://www.freiburg.linux.de/openbios/wishlis t/) of openbios.
Do your part!
Re:Great but no PCI... (Score:1)
Re:Great but no PCI... (Score:1)
BTW no unix workstation that has a console port has been networkable. you dont want it to be. Networking introduces alot of security issues that the colsole manufacturer doesnt need to deel with.
Re:BIOS support for serial console (Score:1)
Not if you behave responsibly, no. Simon has the BOFH nature in spades, which is a good thing.
Of course, if, as you now admit, this box was nobody's responsibility, then I would conclude that it must suck to work for your employer since they seem to be incapable of administering their network effectively.
Re:Great but no PCI... (Score:1)
Of course you don't want a sea of serial cabling, so use a console server that acts as a gateway between TCP/IP traffic and serial connections.
These things only cost about $100/ port, and are prettymuch vital for anyone running a machine room or server farm.
Re:ISA ??? (Score:1)
Because there are a few motherboards out there which don't support PCI in the back-up BIOS.
I used to have one. A Tyan Titan III (S1468 I think). It was a standard Pentium mobo, with mixed PCI/ISA. The BIOS was stored on EEPROM and you could flash a new bios onto the board if you wanted. Lots of motherboards support that. But, there was also a back-up BIOS in real ROM, unflashable. If the flashed bios failed a checksum, then it booted with a very tiny backup bios. Because the backup bios was so small, support for the PCI bus was not included. The only function for this bios was to be able to boot off a floppy and flash a new real bios.
So, one day, something happened to my machine, and the bios got hosed. Checksum error. But, with my fancy PCI graphics card, I couldn't see anything. I had to get an old ISA card and swap it in temporarily while I flashed a new bios.
As long as your mobo has an ISA slot on it, then ISA is the way to go for something like this. It's far simpler to support, and, when things start going wrong with a system, the ISA bus will be more dependable than the PCI bus.
However, high end boards are now shipping PCI only, so, they really should have two versions of the card. That would be the best solution.
Re:Monitors...keyboards...CHEAP! (Score:1)
Pshaw!
I'm currently in Japan, but relying on my server in New York to keep running. If something goes seriously wrong with it, a card like this would be a lifesaver.
I could keep an emergency install CD in the CDROM drive, but keep the boot device as the hard disk. From half the world away I could completely reinstall the OS if I needed to!
There's nothing archaic about that!
Cool, but... (Score:1)
Re:What is the point? (Score:1)
Nobody in their right mind runs X on a server, and it certainly isn't going to do you any good trying to figure out why the remote machine won't boot.
Next time, try reading the linked article.
Re:Monitors...keyboards...CHEAP! (Score:1)
the point is that this gives you complete remote access to your machine.. you have a rack of servers, you put a terminal server in and the wire all the machines into it, then you can remote boot your pc servers by telneting or dialling into the term server.
CPQ has had this for a while now (Insight something). It used to be a card (with a 386 on it), but now it's integrated in most new proliant servers, you just enable it in Compaq's config utility.
TIPOBA (Score:1)
--
BeDevId 15453
Download BeOS R5 PE [be.com] free!
Re:BIOS support for serial console (Score:1)
As for the people who think he is lying about the NT admin seeing the server in its improved state: There are many possible situtations where the old NT admin may come back to the job site months after leaving the job.
For example, they may have needed him on a consultancy basis because some other NT box on the netowrk took a shit.
- Sam
Re:Related Links: Linux - ?!?!?!? (Score:1)
Define open source hardware (Score:1)
In that case, anyone know where I can download the schematic and parts list so that I can roll my own?
Re:My thoughts (Score:1)
On my old Sun Sparc 2s, when you pull the video board, they run to the serial port. No magic hardware. A quick poll during initialization and if there's no video then swap out the console write and keyboard read routines and/or pointers.
BREAK was also used on HP3000s back when I used to run some of them. They may still work that way.
I run a couple of headless machines. Whenever they need some reconfiguration or troubleshooting, I have to lug them back to a nearby monitor. Some other people I know run their serial ports into terminal servers so that they can telnet to the console ports of multiple machines even when the machine itself won't respond to a telnet.
Headless operation doesn't seem to be very hard to add to the boot process, and it would help out a lot of us who operate machines in that mode.
- jeff -
Re:My thoughts (Score:1)
They are working on a PCI version, however.
Great but no PCI... (Score:1)
Actually, PCI *is* Needed! (Score:1)
Even better than a card-based solution would be a BIOS-based solution, IMHO. If Intel is serious about making motherboards for "servers", they better get with it and go with a serial console.
Re:Old News (Score:1)
--
Re:Compaq has these (So does VALinux) (Score:1)
We just recieved a boatload of Fullon's and VA sells a system called the VA Cluster Management System (I've also heard it referred to as "The Mayor", although that is just a software component). I have not read up on it too much (its one of those upgrades we'll probably never get to see).
More info about it is here. Its actually a bit different (and much more expensive), but seems to have similar functionality.
Re:Even better.. ethernet (Score:1)
Boon to serverfarms (Score:1)
Re:BIOS support for serial console (Score:1)
Oh dear. You must be very sad.
S.
Re:Is this really necessary... (Score:1)
However, I will agree with others also and state that this feature really belongs in the BIOS the way its done by Sun.
Re:My thoughts (Score:1)
I think Sun uses the serial line break to get you to the PROM monitor (the "ok"-prompt). I think we can use the same for ctrl-alt-del or SysRQ.
However, this behaviour can be quite annoying, because the break signal occurs also when you power off the serial terminal. We have a Sun E5k here connected to the Linux console server with Cyclades serial board, and it falls into the PROM monitor prompt when we power off the console server.
--
Re:How much does it cost? (Score:1)
Re:ISA ??? (Score:1)
You're right, the machine will take 56.001 seconds to boot instead of 56.0 seconds, and you'll only be able to hook up a 115200 baud terminal instead of a 230400 baud terminal. Yep, they obviously should have made it a 4x AGP card instead of using that ISA crap.
---
Some (un?)related links (Score:1)
Serial to NTSC [slashdot.org]
PIC and PAL [efd.lth.se] equals Tetris. This could be used in a serial->PAL thingy..
PIC->LCD [phanderson.com] pretty ok (BASIC STAMP),if you just need the display, has been hacked to accept ps/2 input (no links)
I just know this has been done before, maybe by the same guys but back then it wasn't a commercial site so I can't say really.
Re:ISA ??? (Score:1)
The board seems to be nice, but two versions of the board are not sufficient if the guys want to support all relevant architectures.
It is my feeling that Compact PCI should be mentioned here as well. Without cPCI version, I am not interested.
happy hacking
Device to shunt serial to keyboard (w/ meta keys)? (Score:1)
We would like to automate many things, but there is no easy way to do it (that we've found). TSR's that copy serial to keyboard don't seem to work well (they don't allow ALT-Key combos, which we need to control the app). Running under DOSEMU doesn't work because the hardware uses DMA. Bar code readers also don't provide Meta keys (at least, not the ones we need).
A simple box that plugs into the keyboard port, and parses serial input into key strokes, would be ideal.
Thanks in advance.
Re:Device to shunt serial to keyboard (w/ meta key (Score:1)
I was on the beta program and it rocks.
Re:Related Links: Linux - ?!?!?!? (Score:1)
Given this...you are correct. There's no "Linux" link whose HREF is www.linux.com.
Broken code, or conspiracy?
Re:Even better.. ethernet (Score:1)
Without a protocol some packets may be losted, but the work of resolving these can be done on the client without much work.
The only issue I see is security. If the machine will always take input from the lan AND one of the inputs is "CTRL-ALT-DEL" which is mapped to reboot, then you could have problems if someone broke into your subnet.
Energy/Enivornmental costs. (Score:1)
Hmm cheap hardware, more rubbish in land fills.
Also have lots of perhperal on standbye is a sure way of chewing more power that it note required. A CRT on standbye can still use a substantial amount of power because the transformer cannot handle such low loads.
Re:ISA ??? (Score:1)
In a PC, every important card (scsi, ethernet, etc.) should have its own unshared interrupt. Adding ISA cards for low bandwidth purposes, eats interrupts from the high bandwidth tasks.
Parity shouldn't be an issue, since a bus isn't supposed to fail. The mechanism exists to isolate errors, since debugging hardware incompatibility is very difficult.
The industry chooses lower supply voltages on electronics simply because it delivers better price/performance ratio, but this does not apply it you have to add a switch mode power supply to your ISA card to create the +3.3 V from +5V.
So in short: Why would anyone in their right mind make a new design based on the ISA bus ?
Green engineers ?
Re:My thoughts (Score:1)
It already exists -- it's called the telnet daemon. Just telnet in, su to root, and reboot.
The problem is, of course, that many times the reason you want to reboot is because the machine is hung, and daemons are not responding. Something outside the normal system is required.
-y
Third time on slashdot... (Score:1)
WRT the card itself, it is hard to justify $200 for this card when you can purchase a brand new Intel motherboard with EMP for $150. If you've got big bucks invested in a server it might be helpful, but do you really want to be plugging in any ISA cards to such a machine?
Re:Not the way to go in a datacenter (Score:1)
Moreover, such solutions allow different platforms (ie Mac, Sun, and Linux Boxes) to be run through the same monitor and or keyboard. This isn't a huge selling point right now... But it may well become one, depending on how the whole Apple Darwin/OS X/OS X Server progression takes off, not to mention Linux PPC, which is an impressive port of Linux to the PPC architecture.
So, there are viable options to run linux boxes all but headless while still keeping them readily accessable to a monitor/keyboard connection.
Price? (Score:1)
This device is really cool
I didn't see it on their site!
Re:Not the way to go in a datacenter (Score:1)
Not to say that all of these things don't measure up, but I've had the displeasure of using a few of them that failed in some manner or other. Sometimes it's a matter of the system not being able to detect a keyboard/mouse at boot-up if the switch box isnt turned to that machine. Sometimes it's a shock sent down the bus that kills the system. And even the cheap ones tend to run in the low 3-digit range for a 2 system box.
Re:Compaq has these (Score:1)
heres a link about them [compaq.com] [the insight boards]
Not only in the server environment (Score:1)
When I bought a new computer, I refused everything I did not need (Windows, internal modem and yes... monitor). My old 486 now runs with a terminal, no monitor, no keyboard. I use my old monitor for my new Celeron, but sometimes I need to boot the old 486, this device is very nice, I have lot's of BIOS related problems on my 486, spares indeed the time of rewireing the old monitor.
Re:Great but no PCI... (Score:1)
That would make more sense than telnetting in, which would imply that you have some thing more than a booting system.
Compaq has these (Score:1)
Re:My thoughts AND I have one (Score:1)
It is ISA because it emulates an IBM MDA video card, which was ...wait.for.it... ISA-based!
Yes, you can send the three-finger-salute, control-tilde to get command mode, then 'x' for, hell, i dunno, some canadian word I guess, then 'c-a-del'. Similarly you can send all the other keys which don't exist in ASCII.
This thing rocks. And yes, we have > 100 servers in our datacenter connected by serial consoles (via lat terminal servers to ethernet to our console server machine).
The only problem preventing us from buying a bunch of these is while it works perfectly in my $499 personal eMachine, I can't get the fscking Dell servers to deal with it!!!
Monitors...keyboards...CHEAP! (Score:1)
And for the random cases where your BIOS has been scrambled by interplanetary nuclear forces, grab the monitor off the desk...6 feet away (!).
I'm sorry, but the old way does not make it the right way! Use the cheap-hardware trend...there's essentially no reason today for anything but a monitor (and most of us use ethernet once the system is booted, anyway
-nullity-
I am nothing.
Re:Monitors...keyboards...CHEAP! (Score:1)
-nullity-
I really am nothing.
this has... (Score:1)
That being said, the serial console extentions to linux are really useful.
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
Re:Great but no PCI... (Score:1)
Re:Actually, PCI *is* Needed! (Score:1)
What is the point? (Score:1)
How much does it cost? (Score:1)
On the whole you're right... (Score:1)
Still, definitely a product with a very small niche.
Re:What is the point? (Score:1)
Speed problems? (Score:1)
Anyway, AFAIR, ISA runs at the speed of the slowest device installed (MDA in this case!).
Now I don't know if this still is true for PCI/AGP, but if you find your machine slowing down, it may be the old MDA card in your machine.
Taking the idea a step further... hardware VNC? (Score:1)
Re:My thoughts (Score:1)
Given that the card has to be long enough to engage the ISA bus completely, and its length is therfore irreducible below that, all you'd be saving is height or width, neither of which gives any benefit when populating a PC. What advantage did you imagine the extra expense of custom engineering would bring?
Re:BIOS support for serial console (Score:1)
Re:Monitors...keyboards...CHEAP! (Score:1)
get an old PSION 3C !!! (Score:1)
It does 80x25 VT100, and has DB9 cable (get one of those DB9-DB25 adapter pieces as well for suns etc...)
It fits in your back pocket.
Re:Serial Linux (Score:1)
Re:Great but no PCI... (Score:1)
Re:How much does it cost? (Score:1)
Re:Monitors...keyboards...CHEAP! (Score:1)
Re:Great but no PCI... (Score:1)
Is this really necessary... (Score:2)
BTW, this is a followup to the Ask Slashdot about KVM switches: disregard whatever it ways in there and just buy the Blackbox. A lot of people said the Linksys units were OK, but I had nothing but trouble. Replaced it with the Blackbox and it's all joy. Someone said the Blackbox is a re-badged Cybex (and we don't need no steenking badges), but I couldn't verify which one, so I just bought the Blackbox, and it's sweet.
Re:My thoughts (Score:2)
What advantage did you imagine the extra expense of custom engineering would bring?
Consider a rackmount situation where the card must fit in a very small case. Height makes a BIG difference there. In a 1U case, the card will be mounted horizontally, making the height matter even more.
Re:Monitors...keyboards...CHEAP! (Score:2)
And for the random cases where your BIOS has been scrambled by interplanetary nuclear forces, grab the monitor off the desk...6 feet away (!).
Given my servers' location, it will take me no less than an hour (travel time) to grab a monitor off the desk and plug it in. Add to that that servers NEVER go down at nice convieniant times like Wednesday at 2:15 PM, it's always 3:00 AM Sunday morning during a thunderstorm when the car won't start (in 6 feet of snow, uphill both ways with the blazing sun burning down on you). It's much nicer to dial in to fix those problems. It also gets the system up faster or at least provides a clue as to what spare parts it will need.
Not the way to go in a datacenter (Score:2)
_damnit_
Re:Not the way to go in a datacenter (Score:2)
That might be cheeper. But won't a limited size operation have a limited number of people who can fix the problem? What if they are home sleeping? Or home sick? If all you have is the keybord/vid switch you either
For a big operation, it may only be the diffrence between the on duty person running form their desk to the right machine room, finding the crash cart and draging it to the right spot vs typing "console machine-name". Call it five to ten minutes. A big operation can lose a lot of money with five to ten extra minutes of down time.
The Sun allready has a great serial console. It can hard-reset the system. It can be told to boot off a diffrent disk controler. It can be told to boot off the same disk controler, but a diffrent disk (which no PC serial port re-director I have ever seen lets you!). It can let you boot off the distro CD and reformat the hard drive and re-install from scratch, all while the machine is sitting in a telco closet 300 miles from your closest employee. The Mac uses the same OpenFirmware base stuff, so I would hope it has retained this as well, but I have no direct knolage, nor really high hopes that Apple kept that bit of non-graphical greatness.
Another nice feature of a serial console vs. a switcher is you can run all the lines into a program that does logging, allows interactiave logins, and watches the log for anything an operator might need to look into "panic" "PAIRTY" and the like. You can get notice of a failure before sombody calls you, or before you next monitoring sweep. You can also get some log to analise, rather then thinking the new Froon2000 motherboard is a bit more flakey then the Froon1000 you can examine a months logs and get a fialure rate. Hard data is better then a vague feeling.
My question is does this gizmo let me bypass a damaged boot image and use my "spare" boot drive (or CD) so I can do a re-install? That would be kinda tough since it isn't the disk controler.
Serial Linux (Score:2)
Re:Is this really necessary... (Score:2)
You can set up three tiers of 8 port cybex 200's to control up to 512 systems from one menu. Also, for remote administration, the 200 has support for one local console (plugged directly into the switch) and a second console up to 500 feet away over standard cat 5. The two consoles can control different systems independently or (this is cool --) the same system at the same time. The colors on the "remote" screen faded and stuff at first, but i ran some shielded cat5 with shielded ends and hooked the remote console up with a flat panel monitor and it is perfect 400 feet away.
~GoRK
Re:My thoughts (Score:2)
BREAK
At least that's what I use with our Intel N440BX servers. (Yes, some things never seem to change; using BREAK in this way dates back to Teletype days.)
Re:ISA ??? (Score:2)
Assuming this is the only ISA card in your system (pretty likely on a server), none of the issues you raise are relevent. It doesn't do DMA, its IO needs are small, it doesn't need PnP, it isn't going to need to share IRQ's, parity is a non-issue, and why should the fact that it's a 5V bus make a bit of difference? All the problems you mention would be genuine issues in many other circumstances--but not this one. Once your server is actually up and running, the only thing this board draws from the bus is power. Prior to that, its performance falls squarely in the "good enough for the purpose" category.
It's a sign of a green engineer to reject a solution on irrelevent technical grounds. There are legitimate reasons to reject an ISA solution--such as the fact that newer server boards don't even support it--but the factors that make it a crappy bus for almost any other purpose just don't apply here.
Re:Monitors...keyboards...CHEAP! (Score:2)
What you should be envisioning here is not "a seperate serial terminal for each server".
You should be envisioning "a terminal server hooked to a bunch of servers, and you telnet into it".
That's one of the tools we use in data center environments, and it's been tried and tested and proven as a good solution for decades.
Even for small environments, if you have never worn out a video port or a keyboard port then you haven't done enough of your proposed solution to really comprehend the problems inherent.
I'd far rather buy a cheap multiport serial card for my main workstation at home and hook my other boxes up to it than futz around with KVM switches or moving cables around.
PC connectors aren't built to be used that much. It's a fact. That's why enterprise hardware doesn't use those connectors.
Re:Even better.. ethernet (Score:2)
Why not. I used to have a 3COM Ethernet bridge that supported RS-232 and telnet for the console terminal. It needed a terminal connected to the serial port for initial setup but everything after that could be done by telnet.
not "proper", but still very useful (Score:2)
That doesn't make it any less useful if you are stuck with a machine that doesn't have serial BIOS support.
I hope, however, that PC vendors will start to adopt the (open firmware standard [sun.com]). People are working on an open source implementation for PCs.
Re:BIOS support for serial console (Score:2)
The last NT Admin is no longer employed in the CC
of the university, but he's still around, since
he is a postgraduate student. He was wondering
why he couldn't login and dropped in.
I'll remember to post a full description of the
organization I work for and a staff list next
along with a short list of recent changes next
time I post. Not.
-W
Re:BIOS support for serial console (Score:2)
I guess it must suck to work for you.
-W
Re:My thoughts (Score:2)
Re:Great but no PCI... (Score:2)
Actually I want the network version. I want to be able to telnet into it, or better yet SSH in. PCI would be nice from a performance standpoint, but not needed.
Re:My thoughts (Score:2)
Of course, if daemons are not available and the system really is hung, there are still a couple of options. You could have the power supply hooked up to an X-10 device that is designed to be operated remotely by telephone, for instance.
Re:My thoughts (Score:2)
Intel's C440GX+ motherboard [intel.com] has a single ISA slot...
Third, the last thing many of us who are maintaining machines with 1 or 2 rack unit heights is another card to try to fit in there. Some of us would like to use what little room we have for things like Gigabit Ethernet cards.
Get a bigger rack.
However, even serial console support isn't perfect. After all, how do you send the three-finger salute over a serial line?
This is actually possible! No, really. Back in the days when I was a BBS sysop (about 10 years ago), I ran a little TSR program (gawd, remember those?
I'd be willing to bet, though, that it would not be difficult at all to write a program such as this as say, a Linux/BSD/whatever daemon. Perhaps such a program even exists already (I never thought to look). Any takers?
Linux has /some/ support for remote admin... (Score:2)
However, if you don't normally have these sort of problems (yeah, right, Murphy loves computers), the capability of doing remote admin is built right into the Linux kernel. Just compile in the "Allow serial port consoles" or some such option, and make sure your init scripts set 'CONSOLE=ttys0' or whatever, and you're all set.
Of course, like I said, if you have boot problems before the kernel loads (oops, I recompiled the kernel remotely, rebooted and forgot to run 'lilo'
Re:ISA ??? (Score:2)
I bet the VGA thing is what's causing Dells to freak out.
ISA ??? (Score:2)
Why would anyone in their right mind make a new design based on the ISA bus ? This is a brain dead bus, without interrupt sharing and severe limitations on DMA and IO. There does not exist a complete specification on the bus, only a collection of random writings and books. There was an attempt by ieee (?) to make a spec, but they failed because of the ugliness of the existing implementations. It has an even more kludgey and unreliable plug and pray specification. The bus has no error correction, parity or ECC. I refuse to put any ISA card in any new computer (cheap home pc or desktop for the secretary), and this card is meant for servers !!
Oh, did I mention that the bus is +5V only ?
Oh well, back to work.
</rant>
Re:My thoughts (Score:2)
It looks like you can give a hardware reset, not gust the nerve pinch.
Sad... (Score:2)
telnet demo.realweasel.com [realweasel.com]
They said:
We know that it is possible to set a BIOS password and other annoying things but we ask that you be kind to the next person trying out the PC Weasel..
As you can guess, a sucker put a password. If he reads me, I can assure him that he's a childish looser.
Cheers,
--fred
Some server boards already have this (Score:3)
_damnit_
For Further Information... (Score:3)
It contains an interview with Herb Peyerl, sometime NetBSD maven and the principal software designer, and some more photos.
But just a few off-the-cuff comments in response to previous posts:
BIOS support for serial console (Score:4)
box crashing along in our computer room, mostly
emmiting SMB traffic and broadcasting some radio
station via realaudio. I felt pitty for the poor
thing (dual PII-233, 256MB ECC RAM, pair of nice UW drives etc) and decided to install a real OS on
it.
Upon openning the case I realized it had an
on-board graphics card, albeit a sucky one,
so I discarded the ati rage pro that the nt
admin added. I then proceeded to install freebsd
on it from scratch. While I was tweaking the BIOS
settings (intel mobo, phoenix bios) I found an
option to redirect the console to a serial port
You should have seen the face of that NT admin
when he saw the box he setup a few months ago
attached to a vt420 doing what the NT box did and
outperforming it while at it.
I wonder why this is not more common - is it so
bloody hard for the BIOS to redirect the console
to a serial port? I don't think so. I really don't
like the idea of an add in board doing that for
you, it is a major kludge. Perhaps we should
make some noise to motherboard manufacturers
until they understand that serial console support
is a good thing, and it can be a selling point.
-W
Even better.. ethernet (Score:4)
My thoughts (Score:5)
However, my first impression of this card is "too little, too late."
First, as an earlier poster pointed out, it's ISA only, not PCI (and server-class motherboards supporting ISA are quickly becoming extinct).
Second, look at that card! It's frigging huge! It looks more like a FPGA prototype; I'm sure the designers could have it converted to a single chip ASIC and make the card 75% smaller.
Third, the last thing many of us who are maintaining machines with 1 or 2 rack unit heights is another card to try to fit in there. Some of us would like to use what little room we have for things like Gigabit Ethernet cards.
Finally, I'm not sure there will be much need for this in a few months. Award (now Phoenix) has a gorgeous ServerBIOS [phoenix.com] (which Intel is using on all of its new server motherboards [intel.com]) which supports serial console support. We're using one of their motherboards in all our new systems (I believe that VA Linux Systems uses them too) and we think they kick ass.
However, even serial console support isn't perfect. After all, how do you send the three-finger salute over a serial line?