You need to be more specific about what console you ware talking about... On my pfSense box, I only needed to utilize a monitor and keyboard for the install an putting IPs on the interfaces I assigned. After that its all WebUI or SSH.
The biggest part of the IPMI question is when do you want to access IPMI? When pfSense is already booted, when it's turned off, or when it's rebooting?
There are a few ways to access IPMI that's part of the pfSense box. It really depends on your network and whether or not you have more than one VLAN or have a separate management subnet. If you are not needing any routing between VLANs cause you are on the same subnet, then it's pretty straight forward. Here are 2 options that I could think of.
- Assign a static IP to IPMI.
- Have pfSense reserve and assign an IP address for IPMI.
I think option 1 is the easiest one to do. Just make sure its outside any DHCP scopes you have created so you don't have any duplicate IP address conflicts. IPMI will always have this address. If you don't any other statically assigned devices, you might have to assign a static IP address outside the DHCP scope when the pfSense box is powered off for a while. If not your computer might end up with a 169.254.xxx.xxx APIPA address and won't be able to talk to the IPMI device. If you are just rebooting the pfSense box, having a statically assigned address on you management computer isn't necessary because it will have a DHCP IP address already assigned to it before the reboot and it shouldn't just drop it immediately.
Option 2 works as well. How well it will work depends on how long you configured the the DHCP leases on the pfSense box, when the pfSense box was last on, and the order things took place.
Someone else could chime in on their experience with how long devices keep their DHCP assigned address after the DHCP server is turned off and whether or not it matters if the lease had expired or not. I think they might keep them indefinitely until a DHCP server is turned on, and would probably depend on the device...?
Your motherboard has a serial port also. You should be able to set it up just like your netgate box, right?