Laptop as USB display device for server rack monitoring ?

[Kim Lux]

Lets say I've got a rack of headless servers.  They do have a video
card, but no monitor.  Lets say that one of them is giving trouble -
won't boot, no network, etc.  The way it is right now, I have to cart a
monitor over to the machine in question and hook it and a mouse and
keyboard up before I can work on it.

Is there a way in Linux to use a USB or firewire equipped laptop as the
monitor/keyboard/mouse for the servers on the rack ?  Could one have a
USB port on the front of each server and direct some sort of video
output from it to the laptop and use the laptop display/keyboard/mouse
as the input to the server ?

I know about X11 and X11 forwarding and that works fine for a lot of
things, but it doesn't work for watching the machine during the boot
process and it won't work on a machine that has a network issue. 

What I am asking for, I guess, is a virtual (software) video card
(device) in the server that takes the X11 display commands that would
have been sent to the video card and redirects them, via the USB cable
to my laptop display.  The laptop would have to be running some sort of
USB device software as well.

Even better would be to be able to use the hard drive/cdrom drive of the
laptop as if they were part of the server as well.

I know it would be difficult to see all of the boot process, but if the
virtual display driver got loaded early on, you could at least see the
rest of the boot process. 

Does anyone know of something like this ?  I've looked and I can't find
anything. 

Thanks

-- 
Kim Lux (Mr.)  Diesel Research Inc