Hello yall, first, this is a kind of "half-topic" issue, but I'll be using Gentoo and the matter is on the interest of this list.
I'll be building a Gentoo Cluster soon in a datacenter 6000 miles (9600 km) away from me... This project has to be as cost efficient as possible. A lot of research was made in this heading: the best cost effective solution. Everything I'll be redundant and scalable. Somethings have three levels of fail safeness (like my storage). So everything can fail. Every single item on the cluster can fail and my service will still be online. Right now I'm concerned with how I'm going to fix software problems when they arrive. I'm thinking about a situation where I have a kernel panic or when the Linux won't boot for any reason (incorrect kernel upgrade, hard drive failure, etc...). To solve this, I'm seeing 2 options right now. The first would be buying a KVM-over-IP unit. But, a KVM-over-IP unit with the number of ports I need is expensive, almost as expensive as the servers it will be connected. The second option would be having another server acting as a USB Guest. This usb-guest-server would be connected to every other server through a USB cable and would be seen as a pen drive with a Gentoo rescue disk inside. Them, if something goes wrong, I can activate the virtual pen drive, remotely reboot the troubled server and it will boot the pen drive. There is a howto about this at http://www.linux-usb.org/gadget/file_storage.html. But I can't find the necessary hardware to do this. Has anyone been able to do anything like this? Thinking about other options, does anyone have any other tip for me? Am I going in the right direction? For the obvious answer: I know it's better to be closer to the datacenter, but that's not an option for me right now and I know I'll have a remote-hands service, but it can be very time inefficient sometimes and I'm trying to avoid it as much as possible. Thank you all. Best regards, Daniel Colchete
