On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 4:23 PM, Buccaneer for Hire. <[email protected]> wrote: > > - >> > Anyway, for me it is a lot easier to snake the one >> long cable across the >> > floor than it would be to roll a cart around. YMMV. >> >> Yup; true. I totally agree. > > We use serial port concentrators which we use to handle most of our problems. > If I have to get up close and personal, we have a bunch of carts we just roll > over and plug in.
In past experience the only time I need non-ssh access is for initial BIOS setup and MAC address extraction. Nowadays, the vendors will ship with the BIOS settings I ask for and also provide the MAC address externally (or I can autoextract from the initial PXE discovery packets). After that its PXE etc. and once I have a shell window everything is OK. In the rare cases that I can't come to the point of a shell even terminal access (via IMPI etc.) rarely helps since at that point a motherboard swap or a dead HDD etc. is involved. So, hopefully I will have very little need for IPMI (remote power cycling is great though; those network aware power distribution stics seem great). -- Rahul _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
