I'm with a small company that plans to sell a rack mounted network appliance which is configurable via a web interface (think of a router configuration page sort of deal), and I'm wondering in large data center like environments what the process usually is for the initial setup of such systems. The main question is, if the system is headless, how do you get initial remote access to it? Do companies usually first plug a server into a monitor/keyboard/mouse in order to configure the network settings before mounting it in a rack? How else would they know what the IP address of the machine was if DHCP (and it can't be hard coded because of IP conflict potential)?