It's a Dell Remote Access Controller! These are usually called iDRAC now, with the I standing for "integrated". This is basically a separate control interface for the machine, so you can turn it on and off remotely
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It seems they call the extra mobo connector the "ESM" connector, and it sounds like it's mostly an interface to another micro on the motherboard that fans out to whatever they need to control. So if I had to guess it's some serial/i2c/spi or someting interface to it?
And it might also have the basic serial port interface on it for console redirection. I'm getting the feeling that DRAC in this age did not support VGA/keyboard/mouse redirection, only serial...
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Oh nope, the manual says it does VGA too. Maybe it is in that connector too. 15 pins is enough for basic VGA + serial x2 or so.
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Ohh wait. They cheat and use drivers. So it doesn't *actually* do VGA redirection. They probably have some hack, like mirroring the VGA text hardware in the iDRAC card or BIOS tricks for text, and rely on drivers for anything else. Same for kb/mouse.pic.twitter.com/QI70UU3eDe
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I remember back when serial console redirection first happned for intel arch. It was a card called the Console Platypus or something and it basically scraped text vram and did OCR on it. LOM for the plaform has come a long way since then!
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