Let's start with the tweets:

@thatcks: Everyone should strongly consider adding 'consoleblank=0' to the kernel command line on your Linux servers. #sysadmin
@thatcks: The Linux kernel blanking the console screen is both unnecessary and dangerous on modern servers and modern setups. You want it off.

By default if you leave a Linux machine sitting idle at a text console, the kernel will blank the display after a while (I believe it's normally ten minutes of inactivity); Linux has probably done this since the very early days. Back in the time of CRT displays this made a reasonable amount of sense, because it avoided burning in the login prompt or whatever other static text was probably on the screen. Screen burnin is not really an issue in the modern age with LCDs, and it's even less of an issue with modern servers that spend a close approximation to all of their time without a display plugged in at all.

The problem with this console blanking is that it is a kernel function and thus the kernel has to reverse it. More specifically, the kernel has to be fairly alive and responding to the keyboard in order to unblank the screen. There are plenty of ways to get a kernel so hung that it is not alive enough to do this, at which point any helpful diagnostic messages the kernel may have printed on its way down are lost, locked away behind that blank screen. We have had this happen to us more than once.

And that is why you don't want your servers to ever blank their consoles; it's not getting you anything worthwhile and it can really hurt you. The best way to disable it is, as I tweeted, to add 'consoleblank=0' to the kernel command line arguments.

(Some people fiddle around with 'setterm -blank 0' in various ways but the kernel argument is more sure and easier.)

(I found out about 'consoleblank=0' and a bunch of additional useful information from this stackexchange question and its answers, when I finally decided to see if we could disable console blanking on our new iSCSI backends. I admit that my motivation for it was rather more petty than the reason here; a blank console can sometimes make their KVM-over-IP Java program freak out in a really irritating way and I was getting tired of that happening to my sessions.)