One thing I miss about Sun SPARC (and other Unix) systems: you had 'proper' remote access at a very low level.
I always found BIOS/UEFI remote console very fiddly and hit and miss (you often have to play with GRUB/kernel settings to get input/output).
There was literally nothing that could go wrong. Then install the OS from the regular console port over the network with bootp/tftp/http.
The complexity of DRAC/iLO setups to control an emulation of a VGA PC setup blows my mind.
IPMI does rather more than than giving you console access, though it's serial, not VGA. Typical server BMCs which embed IPMI do more again. Not to defend the quality of various BMC firmware and support I've encountered...
It was more the remote power/boot/install process which seems unnecessarily complicated these days compared to serial.
An elegant weapon for a more civilised age, or something ;-)
Booting a live cd or installing windows at 1MByte/s speeds (late 1990s CDROMs were faster!) is horribly slow. Maybe iLO5 was a bit better.
usually found it easier (but annoying) to just walk over with a USB drive…
A serial break is the only situation in which an RS232 line is driven +ve with greater than 90% duty cycle: charge a cap slowly on +ve, discharge quickly on -ve (diode), drive a mosfet gate to pull reset line low only when it's been +ve for quarter of a second or so.
Easily the hardest part of doing this is finding a 'clean' way to get a wire attached to the serial RX and GND pins from the inside the case rather than bodging something really ugly. Some boards have a front-facing serial port, though, which has a pin header and cable => easy to tap into.
I'd soldered onto the little legs on a stand off board DB9 port on one batch of machines I installed, and then ended up being thwarted on the next batch of boards which had a slightly different (more enclosed) style of DB9 port that made it much harder to get at the pins.
Whatever you do along these lines will be infinitely better than the insecure, overengineered catastrophe of vendor IPMI/BMC firmware. I wish someone less lazy than me would make a product along these lines... ;-)