Slashdot Mirror
It's 2004: What Are The Best Remote KVM Options?
Tocano33 writes "Saw a story regarding this quietly residing in the /. Story Retirement Home (tm), but it was from over 2 years ago and wanted to see if anyone had some new insight. We have about a dozen servers in our one rack - not a terribly large setup. However, our admins are not located in the server room and while we can use RDP/SSH/VNC/etc for everyday maintenance, we need to be able to perform offline work and may need to evaluate POST information on bootup, etc. So we're currently looking at KVM options - IP based specifically (ie Raritan Dominion) but we're wondering if there are cheaper options and wanted to know what slashdot readers would recommend."
The Dell 2650 server is nice little middle-of-the-road server, that comes witha kick-ass out of band management card, that will allow you to do all kinds of fun stuff, even when the host is switched off - it has a great PERL interface, so you can script it as well - i know that you probably don't have dells, etc, but you may want to check out out of band management cards as well as KVM solutions. They really rock.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Since everybody is already familiar with VNC, why not stick with it when you move to hardware?
http://www.realvnc.com/products/KVM-via-IP/
it's not a pc issue, more a how many are you ready to cash for it one. Just buy a real server with redundant everything, tons of fans, integrated error reporting and a system which allows real remote administration (that is, even if the machine is off, or the network card is dead, or you want to access the bios, or you need to install an os but don't have the cd in the machine so you need to be able to use an image as a virtual drive)...
We had those things for something like $4000 from HP, probably other vendors have similar things, but the bottom line is: it's really worth the money. We thought we couldn't afford that, but it already payed for itself in a few months because we didn't have to do anything on the machine since they were set up, plus not having to drive 50km everytime we really need physical access...
We bought a Raritan KX232 for close to $3,600. It services 32 ports over IP. Little integration dongles that connect to your PCs and talk IP over CAT5 close around $75/ea. The whole system works extremely well. The only issues we've had are that their management interface is currently an ActiveX control for IE (a Java one is promised soon) and that when I use Microsoft RDC to connect in to our network (through the firewall) and bring up a PC in the data center, mouse tracking is all messed up. Essentially I'm doing VNC at the remote desktop to a PC in the data center. It can be a little frustrating. But, the hardware is exceptional. We effectively trashed all our old Belkin crap.
I second the Avocent KVMs. The newer ones allow you to cable between the switch and the KVM unit via Cat-5 cabling (and their special dongles, of course). They have dongles for Sun, PC (both USB and PS/2), and serial, and the remote software works on Linux and Windows.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
this company makes hardware serial console cards for PCs. They're just PCI cards that emulate a VGA video card (text) and PS/2 keyboard. They also come with a remotely-triggerable pair of pins that you can hook up to the machine's reset connector. They'll get you into the BIOS, you can install an OS, etc... and they're only $350 which is quite cheap for this sort of thing in PC land.
Er, yeah. There's been no talk of KVM's in AskSlashdot in 2004.
Learn to search old stories first, you goon.