Because of the serial concentrator, you can access the console of a machine in a colocation cage from your desktop. The real limiting factor so far has been that even though you can access the Linux console via a serial port, most x86 hardware was not set to send its POST and BIOS information to the serial port. There is two parts to getting a serial console set up under Linux. First, you must tell Linux to redirect its console output to the serial port. Second, you must set up mgetty to start a login process on the serial port once the kernel has completed booting.
Some distributions use mingetty for the video console, but mingetty has no serial port support.
You will instead want to use mgetty. Check your motherboard documentation for more information about this. Change this for the name of your kernel. If you are monitoring the serial port, you'll see the Linux bootup information coming over the serial port. We'll cover that in Section 3.2.