The mailing lists are archived, so your conversation can be found on marc.info and gmane.org's servers, such as
here.
The "they" you referred to was a single person - Stuart Henderson, one of OpenBSD's developers (sthen@). I can't say I understand his response entirely either, but then, I have no experience with IPMI operation. The part I
do understand is the serial device configuration. The boot console can be serial, or you may have a non-console serial device (tty).
My knowledge of IPMI ends with
Wikipedia, where serial connections are noted as
optional with IPMI versions 1.5 and 2. Your link to your hardware spec page in your misc@ conversation mentions IPMI 2.0, which the Wikipedia article states uses
Serial over LAN.
I recommend replying to Stu and him clarifying questions. If you prefer, you can ask him by replying to his address at
spacehopper.org, rather than to the mailing list.
From what little I can gather, without knowledge of your system or of any other IPMI system, is that your "missing keystrokes" could be an issue of serial flow control.
Could be. You can change flow control options in /etc/ttys, as described in ttys(5), and restart getty with
# kill -s HUP 1 as described in init(8), then log in once again and see if the problem is fixed.
Be warned -- you
must have alternative access, such as an accessible sshd(8) server running so you can log in with ssh(1), because any change you make in /etc/ttys could render your serial connection inoperable.