The Sun Advanced Lights Out Manager (ALOM) console allows you to see console messages and diagnose issues beyond what may be logged at the OS level.

You get to the console from the rj45 port on the back of the server, and connect it to the serial port of a laptop. Then you can use hyperterminal to access the box.

On some servers, the sc port is also the console port. So to switch, you issue #.
hash dot.

Nobody can ever remember the passwords.
So the guys in #solaris helped me out.

If you can log into the box, and get to a root prompt then you can issue the scadm command. This shows all the users, allows you to set new ones, and to reset passwords.

Once in the sc prompt, these are some helpful commands:

sc> consolehistory -v
sc> showlogs -v