Hi, I have a farm of rack-mounted servers (various types of PII and PIII motherboards currently) running FreeBSD that I manage via the serial console after the BIOS phase. In most cases, the motherboard BIOS doesn't support removing the graphics adapter. Some of the motherboards have "serial redirect" which works somewhat...
That said, and as a newbie but enthusiastic wannabe, are there any Pentium III/4 motherboards out there that I can run linuxbios on to boot FreeBSD with all linuxbios output going to com1 and then have FreeBSD also output serial console info to the same serial port (and doesn't require a graphics adapter to be present)? If not, depending on what is involved (how easy is it to make this functionality generic across types of motherboards), I'm willing to donate money to see this added to the linuxbios capabilities. Vendors who sell motherboards with at least 2 10/100 ethernet interfaces and 4 memory slots that have linuxbios running with this functionality are welcome to contact me. Ideally, it should also include functionality that is like what is available as LOM (lights-out-management) on the Sun Netra series (you can hit #. and break into a battery backed mode that allows you to power up/down and hardware reset the server over the RJ45 serial port -- it's very nice for remote management; the Netras also don't in general have graphics adapters and so it keeps the cost down (ie. $995 for the base Netra X1, but I can't run FreeBSD on it, yet)). I'd also be interested in blade servers that can run linuxbios and have this functionality. Thanks, Adi
