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It’s bizarre that one needs to do all this via a keyboard/monitor interface.

Nearly thirty years ago when I used to work on Silicon Graphics kit everything from powering on and off a server to installing the OS from scratch over the network could be done out of band via serial - and automatically, using expect(1)

That’s progress, I guess.

by toast01 hours ago|

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server ipmi includes serial over lan, which can work ... it's helpful if the console settings for early boot match the console settings for OS boot, and there's no standard for sharing them, so that's a bit of a mess... and then you have some where serial over lan drops out during boot, which is kind of terrible. :(

But, the devices here are geared towards people using consumer products as servers (which I do at home, not critizing), and serial console during early boot is not an option on those, and most boards don't even have a serial port anymore.

I will say, if you're presenting a usb keyboard, you might also be able to present usb storage which could be nice for booting off of.

by wang_li2 hours ago|

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They aren't a hard problem to solve. In the server market it's completely solved with a BMC. The problem being solved here is someone wants to make a product using some commodity product like a raspberry pi, perform video capture on a VGA/HMDI/DP port. This is not actually a problem end users have.

If you want to plug into a system that isn't server class, then they should be producing a video card that hooks into the USB bus, the always on rail of the power supply, the power switch pin of the power supply, and has an RJ45 jack. The contents of the card should be an off the shelf BMC chip.

But realistically if you want this kind of functionality, just buy server class systems that come with it.