Serial lines as consoles are still with us, since a serial port can be used for communication even when all else has failed on the system. I built my own based on an off-hand comment by someone on the OpenBSD lists. I'll walk through how and why I did it along with the history and improvements in my solution. The talk will walk through my implementation choices and their good points, bad points, and points I shouldn't admit to in public. At the end of this talk, attendees should have a good sense of the issues around building their own console server and be able to avoid some of the pitfalls I came across. Points of discussion: Choosing hardware: Qualities and trade-offs Advantages to using software in base Driver Issues and other bumps along the way How the console server has changed over the years Advantages over IPMI, iLOM, and others Features you may want Problems others have run across What I'd do differently Kein Ton, aber Präsentation!