| If you have physical access to the XServe then you can use the serial port to set the IP address manually.
Connect up a null modem cable to the serial port on the back of the Xserve to another machine with a display and a serial port. I found an old windows laptop running "hyperterminal" which comes bundled as a default program under Start/Accessories/Commincations is useful for this.
Run the serial terminal program and connect to the XServe with 57600 baud, 8 bit, 1 stop bit, no parity and you should see a logon prompt appearing on the terminal program. If the XServe is fresh out of the box, then you can log in as "root" with password being the first 8 characters of the long serial number printed on the back of the machine.
Once you log in to the machine as root, run the command,
ipconfig en0 manual 192.168.10.10 255.255.0.0
change the third argument for your IP address and the fourth to your subnet mask.
that will force the xserve to take the given address and make the ethernet port available until the next reboot. Once you've done that you can use the GUI tools such as "Server Admin" to complete the setup across the network.
NB. The ipconfig command is not persistent across reboots so you have to set the right network settings via the GUI tools as well to make the change permanent.
there is also the commandline tool
"serveradmin network settings"
which you could investigate. I'm not sure of the syntax for it but it allows you to make persistent changes from the command line.  |