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Running Old Desktops Headless?
CajunArson writes "I recently dug up an old P4 that is in fine working order and did what any self-respecting Slashdotter would do: I slapped Linux on it to experiment with making an NFSv4 server. One other thing I did was to remove the old AGP video card to save on power, since this is a headless machine. Now, I removed the video card after the installation, and I'm doing just fine as long as the machine will boot to a state where networking works and I can SSH to it. My question: Is there a good solution to allow me to log into this box if it cannot get on the network? I'm looking for solutions other than slapping a video card back in. In my case, I will have physical access to the machine. A few caveats to make it interesting: This question is for plain old desktop/laptop systems, not network servers designed to run headless. Also, I am aware of the serial console, but even 'old' machines may only have USB, and I have not seen any good documentation on how and whether USB works as a substitute. Finally, if there is any way to access the BIOS settings without needing a video card, that would be an extra bonus, but I'm satisfied with just local OS access starting from the GRUB prompt."
As many others have mentioned, the serial console is the way to go. Even if there's no DB9/DB25 serial port out the back, there's likely at least one serial port header on the motherboard. The header/pinout is generally standard, so go digging in that 'really old parts' box that we all have and see if you can dig up a DB9 port mounted on a plate to mount where a card would normally go. It will have a ribbon cable to attach it to the motherboard...
I actually worked on a small project that involved deploying headless desktop-based Debian servers to locations all over the continental US.
We'd fed-ex the boxes, and most of the time, they'd show up with a hard drive detached, or worse (one fedex ground shipment from CA to FL knocked the RAM right out of the slots on one box). What was worse, we didn't have any technical expertise on site to speak of, so even simple problems were hard to diagnose.
The ASUS motherboards we were using happened to have serial ports, and the BIOS also happened to natively support pumping text-mode input/output over said serial interface -- so you could edit BIOS settings, tweak bootloader settings, put the machine in single user mode and fsck the whole disk, etc. etc. all over serial.
We experimented with plugging these things into serial-over-ip devices; specifically, one like this one -- although I think we paid about $60 each. Results were mixed. For one, it was pretty painful getting things operating at a reasonable serial bitrate (especially for curses-esque interfaces like the BIOS settings interface -- characters were getting lost), and making them reliably accessible over IP wasn't easy either. You could configure these things to "phone home" when they were powered on, but the configuration interface and documentation was pretty bad.
If I recall correctly, KVM over IP devices were a bit more pricey.
So, long story short, when it comes to low-cost remote server management, in my experience, there's something of a lack of quality offerings.