I was at Linux.conf.au and saw the talk by the company that deployed the system

1. The school is projected to grow to 1500 pupils over the next few years

2. The server room thing was the standard said they needed 8 racks of servers, instead they just needed 4 servers taking up less than half a rack.

There were a bunch of articles a few months ago about the same sort of thing:

Like this one which includes a link to a paper from 2005 with the same idea.

Who was the moron who design serial?, about 200 different combinations just to be able to console something.

Sure everything these days is ( usually ) 8N1 (bad luck if it isn't) but then you just have to play with the speed ( 1200, 4800, 9600, 19200, 38400, 57600) and actual connector ( 9 pin, 25 pin, rj45) , the gender ( male or female) and the magic sauce ( straight through, null modem, rollover) .

Seriously great fun when your machine has died, a few thousand customers are offline and you are trying to just login and fix it.

Please tell me there is some USB console standard that is just plug and play.