[prirun]

In a previous life, I and a biz partner ran a web company on about 5 servers. We cabled the serial ports together in a daisy chain, used serial port consoles, and had software running on every system to access the ports. This way, if a system died, you just had to ssh into the system connected to it and you had access to the failed system's console. These were Supermicro servers, so the pre-boot screens and all that were also available. It came in very handy and saved us lots of trips to Hurricane Electric.