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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...