console access

[Andrew Snow]

Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> Supermicro IPMI cards are notoriously buggy.  A few of the system
> engineers at Yahoo! who I know continually bitch and moan about how
> horrible they are.  My advice: do not install the IPMI card which is
> causing your problems.

The remote KVM control feature was an important requirement so the card 
is staying.  Luckily it uses the Intel gigabit NIC which seems to work 
well in 7-STABLE, I have no complaints so far.  Every feature works well 
except virtual media.

> Booting FreeBSD off of USB devices is known to be broken; see "BTX,
> boot2, and loader" section at the below URL:
> 
> http://wiki.freebsd.org/JeremyChadwick/Commonly_reported_issues

Thats interesting - I regularly use USB sticks to boot freebsd as its 
easier for installation on cluster machines/routers that lack CDROM 
drives.  I've used it on, I think, half a dozen different 
motherboards/architectures and its worked well on all of them, the
Supermicro box was the only broken one.

Because virtual media emulates a USB device I'm pretty sure thats why it 
wasnt working - the USB problem, not a problem with the IPMI card.

- Andrew