[Gllug] front panel light

[Russell Howe]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2007 at 09:03:26PM +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
> Well, in his scenario the machine would be in single user mode so
> ssh not available.  However I would say that it is what serial
> console / lights out management is for.  Spend ages faffing about
> with USB lights or buy real machines in first place; I know which I
> would choose.  Sadly not helpful for those who have already bought.
> :(

I picked up a Compaq Remote Insight Lights-Out Edition (there's a
mouthful!) card from ebay for a tenner or something recently. It's now
sitting in a database server at work waiting for the day when it saves
my bacon. How well it works in non-Compaq kit, I don't know. It's old
and not very good, but it does at least seem to work.

There's also the "PC Weasel" or "Real Weasel" series of cards, which
I've not used, but which look quite good. I don't know if they're still
in production though, and no doubt they're expensive.

Dell have something you can get as an add-on to their servers, and HP
seem to build iLO into their new stuff as standard (although it's by
default pretty basic and you need to fork out extra cash for an
"Advanced iLO license" if you want such fancy things as a graphical
remote console - serial port access is free, however). No doubt IBM do
something too.

My only real experience with the more recent stuff is a HP DL320 G5 we
bought a few months ago, which is a 1U thing with iLO onboard. I set the
bootloader to use the serial console, made it pass serial console
parameters to the kernel and set up a getty on the serial port in
/etc/inittab and it's pretty much completely remotely-administratable.

I should probably stick a minature Linux distribution in a small corner
of the hard drive, or set up a decent initramfs to cover me in the event
of the main Debian install going titsup, but it seems pretty usable.

You could probably get something useful by setting everything to netboot
and then setting your boot server to serve up kernels with parameters to
boot into a diagnostic distribution over the network or something.
Wouldn't be quite as powerful as onboard remote management, but it
wouldn't be far off. One of the main things I can think of is that it
would be hard if not impossible to split that off from the rest of the
network as a separate 'management network' which you can do with the
remote admin stuff (on the HP boxes, it's a separate ethernet port).

-- 
Russell Howe       | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at siksai.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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