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Comment by frutiger | Hacker News Reader

I would wager that almost no Linux installs are done by CD or displaying VGA anymore (maybe 0.01%).

> I would wager that almost no Linux installs are done by CD or displaying VGA anymore (maybe 0.01%).

When one of your Proxmox (or XCP-ng, or VMware/Nutanix/OpenStack) servers won't boot and you need go into single-user/rescue mode, then talk to me about the convenience or not of a remote KVM (versus having to drive to the DC and hook up the crash cart).

It's all very well if all you manage is VMs/instances, but some of us deal with the hardware that those VMs run on, and things break.

That 0.01% of servers is probably the layer that the other 99.99% run on (and yes, a lot of that 0.01% can also be automated, but if PXE isn't working (or you're getting strange CPU3VOLT or SLOT17ECC or BUS1RESET errors) then neither is re-imaging).

The alternative isn't driving to the DC; it's remote serial console through a console server or the BMC.

It's a very good habit to make your Proxmox hosts PXE-bootable to avoid this kind of situation. We're using this approach with Talos as Kubernetes host and it works very well.

Path dependence again. x86 servers in the 1990s had to have VGA so it was never removed. (Except Oxide.)

Oxide happened long after (U)EFI brought proper serial support to boot process

Yet every UEFI server has VGA and remote KVM.

Because pretty much every BMC out there in last decade is shipping AST2400/2500/2600 which include VGA and you want to deal with cases where people do not know how to navigate serial console, especially in case of windows servers

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