Luke S Crawford wrote: > Steven Kurylo <[email protected]> writes: > > >> While the DRACs on my 2650's are old (which may excuse them), I find >> they're horrible compared to my HP iLo's. >> > > This was also my experience. (I don't own any HP or Dell kit, but > I've worked for clients with many of both.) > > >> They're quite slow. Sometimes the DRACs serial and video redirect >> become read-only. I've never figured what causes it. They hang more >> often, though I can't recall off hand I'm sure there's a way to reboot >> them without pulling power. >> > > You can solve most of DRAC's problems by redirecting the linux console > to the DRAC serial and using SSH to access the drac. > > a seperate serial console and rebooter setup is still cheaper and more > reliable, though. > > I have never seen a KVM over IP that worked very well, but the HP > stuff was noticably more reliable than the DELL stuff. Either way, > you are best off using serial (either through the 'lights out' card > or through a seperate serial console server.)
If you don't have the kind of capability you need through something like ILOM, then the forcible power control rebooter stuff could do it, but seems kind of crude. As far as remote systems to connect to the serial console, if you just have a few servers at a location, and you have an older unused desktop machine (an old iMac will do), you can do what I have done pretty inexpensively: http://blogs.umass.edu/choogend/2008/05/23/ammonoidea/ Having all that behind a firewall, closing off all ports but ssh, putting it in stealth mode, and using tcpwrappers to limit access to only a few IP addresses, makes it quite secure as well as easy to use. I ssh in, and the motd reminds me the command sequences to use. `screen -rx sysadmin/serverx` gets me the serial console with its history intact. `ctrl-a d` disconnects without ending the screen console session. Whenever I visit the site, say to rotate tapes out of the library, I run software updates, since I don't use the graphical interface from the outside. Though I could set it up with Timbuktu and do that over ssh. -- --------------- Chris Hoogendyk - O__ ---- Systems Administrator c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center ~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst <[email protected]> --------------- Erdös 4 _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
