IPMI has its place, but it clearly shows how none of us can trust commercial entities to properly support hardware long term. The OS that runs on IPMI is usuall

IPMI has its place, but it clearly shows how none of us can trust commercial entities to properly support hardware long term. The OS that runs on IPMI is usually relatively secure when the system is new, but as soon as there's a new CPU socket, the manufacturer starts caring less and less about keeping the older systems up to date, even if the same IPMI hardware is on both old and new boards. If we could load our own OS on to the IPMI hardware, it's be worlds more useful, because we could safely connect it straight to the Internet. As it is, we need sideband communications (VPN, port forward over ssh, separate network segment, whatever), which makes it so that we end up with lots of extra hardware and configurations just to support IPMI. For large installations, the extra cost is better aggregated, but for small installations, it's a rather large burden. Heck - for colocating a single machine, it's not even worth it. Since it's not possible to run IPMI directly on the Internet securely, I've ended up pairing machines with Pis of some sort. Doing this makes it just as easy - heck, easier - to use a serial port. That means we're back to the standard serial port control we've had since the days of VAXen and Sun and Alpha systems, which, the more I think about it, made much more sense than a network interface that's insecure.