Why would you want this type of solution instead of/in addition to FilerView?
Some of us old die-hard command-line guys have never used FilerView. I personally think the whole GUI/WWW thing is a fad. :-)
... Granted, FilerView is network-bound (correct?), but if you need to dial in under a complete network outage wouldn't any RAS/terminal server solution do? (I'd be concerned about security issues with my filer console ports connected indirectly to a modem, though.)
For me it's the convenience of having one box for talking to my SPARCs, Filers, routers/switches, UPSes, etc. It's all about being able to get to the PROM. :-) Plus it's a multi-function solution: Having a couple of modems - one for dialout to send text messages to pagers or cell phones, and one for dialin (with dail-back) to give access when the external connectivity is down is nice. _Logging_ your console output is a big plus. Being able to run monitoring apps or catch SNMP traps on the console/paging server is a benefit. A standalone terminal server isn't really designed to do that. And the 'conserver' package lets multiple people view (many readers/one writer) a single console, which is neat.
More importantly, if the network is hosed on a machine the serial console is still a way to unwedge things. Upgrading IPFilter or SSH or renumbering a machine without a reboot is kinda cool - you can "ifconfig down" to your heart's content without sawing off the branch you're sitting on. :-)
That's just my reasoning, anyway. To each his own, eh?
-- Chris
-- Chris Lamb, Unix Guy MeasureCast, Inc. 503-241-1469 x247 skeezics@measurecast.com