

It can be a Cron job that runs every minute. Run a script that:
- Checks for the existence of a file, if it exists, exit.
- (Optional) ping your end, if it’s up, continue, otherwise exit
- Touches said file.
- Runs SSH to try and connect to your end. If the connection is made everything halts here until the connection drops.
- Cleans up said file.
- Exits.


Only systems that have framebuffer console enabled at boot I guess.
Recovery mode booting would probably be normal 80x25 text console in case there was something up with framebuffer initialisation.