No VGA

There were servers with no video output.

Sun machines had no monitor port. No VGA connector. Dell and HP x86 boxes all had one. Sun did not.

So how did you operate them? Two ways.

First, the serial console. On a 1U rackmount, the serial port was RJ-45. You needed an adapter cable. Text only, painfully slow. Characters crawled across the terminal at roughly the speed of GPT on a slow day. It was enough.

Second, you could throw X Window over the network. Run an X server on your local machine, forward the display from remote Solaris. Use X only when you needed GUI. Otherwise, serial or telnet. The screen was here. The computation was there. A prototype of every remote desktop that followed.

The x86 world had iDRAC and iLO. A small computer living inside the server. Even with the OS dead, you could power-cycle the machine and poke at the BIOS over the network. Being able to reboot a server remotely was salvation for engineers dragged out of bed at 3 a.m.

iDRAC was a paid option, though. An add-on card you had to budget for. On the SI side where I worked, every hosting project meant fighting the client for that line item. "Can't you just go to the data center?" They could never picture the cost of a human driving to a colo at 3 a.m.

None of it helped with physical failures. A dead disk meant someone drove to the site and swapped it by hand.

In the cloud era, I rarely touch serial consoles or iDRAC anymore. But feeling my way into screenless servers in those years still pays off today.