Dave makes some great points here. We have about 80 critical boxes
running Slackware on x86 or Solaris on SPARC in an unmanned site, there
is hands-on remote-screwdriver people just in case but in 2 years of
operations we've never had to send people there in an emergency as
everything from the servers to the routers are all accessible by a
serial terminal server with ADSL, and dialup backup just in case.
I've even got a SunRay there so we can get back to our "usual stuff"
when we've got guys or gals on site installing stuff.
Some joke router company released something a while ago claimed to be a
"gigabit multi functional router" that you had to plug a USB wire into
and use a Windows management all to get it working. We had one in to
test and I didn't even bother unpacking it.. I really hope I'm dead and
buried before the world comes to that....
--
Leigh
Dave McGuire wrote:
On Jun 20, 2006, at 11:07 PM, Blaster wrote:
And I have a 15 year old ASCII terminal downstairs...It too never
needed
upgrading or patching, and it too still works just as it did the day I
bought it 15 years ago, but it really isn't all that useful by today's
standards.
Interesting. I use them all the time. Servers do need consoles you
know, despite this annoying and unbelievably stupid propensity for some
vendors to configure servers destined for datacenters with
framebuffers, keyboards, and mice.
When a server crashes and can't be accessed by the network, what do
you do,
drive in to your data center? All the data centers I've been in in
the last
10 years have switched over to network terminal concentrators, ALOM,
RSC,
HMC, etc, etc for a true lights out environment. I haven't had to
drive in
to work at 3am to fix a hung server
If the machines are important enough, there should be someone
on-site 24/7. If the company is too cheap to hire adequate staffing
to be on-hand for critical systems (we used to call this a "NOC", back
when companies hired clueful people), then remote console access is a
reasonable substitute. Heck, even my home datacenter (which I
consider important, as it pays my mortgage and puts food on the table)
has all critical systems' consoles accessible to Cisco 2511 terminal
servers.
...which also has a serial terminals connected to them.
Console access should be simple, bulletproof, secure, and absolutely
reliable...and for that, a good old-fashioned terminal simply can't be
beat. Even simple systems like RSC increase the number of chips, and
the number of lines of code, between your eyes and a root shell prompt
by many orders of magnitude. That sort of complexity is the LAST
thing someone needs when trying to troubleshoot a failed critical system.
I mean no disrespect, but I suspect you may have been infected by
the cult of "it's been around awhile therefore it's automatically
obsolete", also known as "if it's old, it's bad, and if it's not new,
it's old." :-(
since the day we wheeled the last ASCII terminal out to the
recycling pile.
*laugh* Interesting, I have remote console access for my unmanned
sites, but you'd better believe the first person who takes the ASCII
terminals out of those rooms will be looking for a job the next day.
And let's not get me started on dumpstering functional equipment in
general, as about $200 of my "selling stuff in my spare time" money
last month was made by selling used ASCII terminals. =)
My original point, however, is that servers in a datacenter are a
very bad place for graphical consoles. Is my opinion on this matter
commonly held? Nope. Do people laugh at me for it? Yes, on
occasion. Do the companies I work for clamor all over themselves for
the uptime stats that I deliver to their production groups? Yup.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Cape Coral, FL
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