Same in Seattle. There are 68,000 millionaires in this county, 4th in the whole country. Microsoft's practices have wildly inflated housing costs in the whole region.
The percentage of uranium in ore bodies that are mined tends to be pretty low as such things go -- lots and lots of ore gets extracted and processed to get those kg's of U, then it has to be enriched wrt U235 to be useful. The de-enriched aka "spent" U238 waste product is used to poison anyone we shoot artillery shells at.
I interviewed with Amazon once for a sysadmin job in the late 1990's or early 2000's. The position didn't even rate a cubicle, just a chair at a shared desk with an NCD16. I was expected to be on-call 24x7 and the salary was less than I was making at the time. They ended up not offering me the job because I didn't live downtown, less than 5 minutes from the office.
I suspect that had I spoken hindi, looked down my nose at everyone, and worn grotty man-sandals they might have liked me better.
Of course -- IBM's IMM, Dell's DRAC, HP's iLO, Soracle's ILOM, generic stuff on certain Supermicro systems, etc.
It's completely pushbutton
... except for somehow learning those MAC's. I'm guessing that your hardware has a primary NIC MAC printed on the outside and your hardware monkeys are up to reading and reporting such? I don't have either of those luxuries, or necessarily a reliable way to DHCP, so I rely on a working serial console out of the box to statically configure IP on the service processor and to read the primary NIC's MAC. On a good day when IOS-XR, JunOS, etc. co-operate I can then configure relayed DHCP using the MAC to effect a kickstart, but so far every new location or piece of equipment presents a new and different way that the process is broken. Right now trying to figure out how to get an ex3300 switch to stop eating DHCP broadcasts and pass them upstream. Without a functional serial console all I could tell is that the thing wasn't working, with almost no way to troubleshoot.
What nonsense. Every hear of IBM's Remote Supervisor Adapter?
No, because it appears to be rather old. I believe that it was superseded by IMM.
Simple serial port access is handy but the x86 vendors aren't so stupid that they make you attach physical keyboards or even KVM concentrators.
Yes, actually, many of them are.
I've worked in environments where dozens of xSeries servers are provisioned daily without a single keyboard or monitor anywhere in the datacenter.
How? Reliance on DHCP being available? Some complex IBM-specific management application? Since you only have that one DC, how well would your setup work with 30 remote unstaffed locations?
1.) SPARC hardware is still WAY superior with remote management than any x86 POS I've ever managed. The ALOM on a SPARC
You're using hardware that old? My understanding (which could be flawed) is that the SPARC systems have used ILOM for a number of generations now.
and a serial cable from my Mac works EVERY time. When I worked in past shops managing thousands of Linux Dells and HP's we had nothing but issues with ILOs from the hardware and OS side. Just pure donkey shit.
I here you there. Modulo the stupid pause-on-Break behavior that went away quite a while ago, Sun has mostly understood remote management via serial console for years. This is something that Dell, IBM, and even Cisco people that I've talked to just don't understand. HP recently has shown some understanding and improvement: iLO 2 sucked hard, iLO 3 was a little better, but now iLO 4 version 1.10+ works reasonably well for initial setup via serial console and subsequently the HTTP interface once one figures out how to configure IP, but before that I saw all sorts of crap, and entering the curses-style ORCA even today from the console is nearly impossible. I still haven't figured out a way to get a real host console when SSHing to iLO, but the serial connection mostly works now, once we found an adapter that works on their anachronistic DB9 connector. I demo'd an IBM system last year, and even IBM's techs couldn't give me a way to make the serial console work.
When you're a start-up buying used hardware it is a great way to cut cost where investors/owners LOVE. Frankly SPARC hardware in my experience can keep on chugging where those HPs and Dells are falling apart right and left. I don't have time to be fucking with hardware when I'm running the show of a million hats.
FWIW HP hardware has been reliable for us so far. We were stuck with a number of G6 systems that are mostly gone, a few G7's and quite a few G8's now. My experience has been that the G8 systems are massively better than what preceded them. The DL580 G7 on the other hand, I have little confidence in.
For each new x86 hardware update for Linux, it's a whole new 'testing' to make sure it doesn't blow up the OS on the next reboot. Never had that with SPARC of maintained properly.
I've seen a couple of Solaris patch bundles over the years that could render a system unbootable (modulo netbooting or an alternate LU environment), and in the last year a couple of stupid RHEL/Linux kernel bugs that also could render a system unbootable (no LU or way to revert changes, only a netboot rescue environment)
4.) Virtualization is WAY superior than KVM or VMWare. I've used many of the OpenSource VM solutions and frankly non compare to the control that I can do with either LDOMs or Solaris Containers/zones.
I haven't personally played with Linux virtualization, but my experience with zones was disappointing.
5.) ZFS yeah, Linux we hear your promises of a bad-ass filesystem, I'm still waiting.
Damn straight. Btrfs sure isn't it. I set one up recently to test it, and found that for the thing to mount at boot-time I had to enumerate all of the component disks in the friggin' fstab, and then enabling compression resulted in space utilization *inflating* by 2x, compared to 20x compression that ZFS gets on the same data.
So, just as an example, the IBM x3750 M4 doesn't exist? It has 32 cores and can go up to 1.5TB of RAM. It is less than $50K.
It also needs a legacy keyboard and video monitor to install, and lacks any working serial console. It's a desktop that comes with (bizarre) rack rails.
I think you are right. If it absolutely must work at all costs then Sun made sense. Otherwise Cent OS on X86 or something similar is good enough.
... so long as your needs don't include storage. Linux storage is friggin *pathetic. Separate layers for RAID, volumes, and filesystem, with none of them particularly easy to manage. In 2013 there still isn't a single compressing filesystem. Sun's ZFS and the stability of Solaris were invaluable, but they shot themselves in the foot business-wise, then Oracle came in and chopped off the whole metaphorical leg.
Ok , here's one. Albeit a few years ago.. We were having a lot of sad times with the Sun V880. We wanted faster Disk I/O along with a more usable OS. Solaris 9 (& 10), at the time, would boot and run Oracle but it was impossible to get patches for it. We used to download them from Sun's website but then all of a sudden you needed a Vendor ID.
What's a "Vendor ID"? Patch bundles used to be publicly available but that tightened up IIRC before Oracle took over. All one needed for access was a support contract. I used wget to grab Solaris patches years ago and I still do today. Even without a contract the patch bundles were readily available elsewhere with a modest amount of effort.
I have not heard one single source say they were leaving SPARC because of performance concerns.
We did, partly, and that was long before the Oracle buyout. Sun stopped selling a basic SPARC system for general-purpose applications. They either didn't want to bother creating new chips with per-core performance, or more likely couldn't, so they went with the niche CMT approach instead, which was useless to us, and made the entry point ludicrously expensive. Lacking any viable SPARC systems, we went to the x4100/x4200 etc modules which worked well.
The shops that buy SPARC equipment do not have price of servers as a primary concern. Everyone who's left has left because of Oracle.
Clearly you do not in fact know the motivations of "everyone".
Oracle is going to need to come up with a new game to make waves with the new processor. Simply improving a processor isn't going to change the fact that what people want are low cost processors without vendor lock in.
Larry has stated explicitly that he does not want to be in the "low end" and general-purpose server markets. This is one reason why we reluctantly gave up on Sun/Oracle hardware. Another is that dealing with Sun was always painful and Oracle made that several times worse. Last Sun/Oracle hardware we bought was an x4270m2. It took a couple of months to find a VAR who could even quote the thing, and even then Oracle demanded a description of why we wanted to buy the thing and what we wanted to use it for before they would give the VAR permission to quote. Clearly they do not want our business.
Sun made a name for itself with interesting hardware, but that was before processing power was a commodity.
Well-made, easily-racked, easily-managed servers still aren't a commodity, and Solaris still blows Linux away in a number of areas.
There's little that the hardware and their database can do that can't be replicated by x64 and something like Postgres with some thought behind your architecture.
Um, you do realize I hope that Sun/Oracle have sold x64 systems for years. We've been running Postgres on them for ~8 years.
For certain, the features they do have are not cost effective against the hundreds of thousands of dollars you pay for Oracle DB licensing, and the premium you pay for SPARC hardware and support.
Again, Sun/Oracle != SPARC, and the hardware is not dedicated to Oracle's DB.
When I bought my LCD/LED to replace the DLP that broke (Fuck you very much, Samsung!) I saved hundreds by forgoing 3D and hundreds more by forgoing the yellow-pixel foo. YMMV.
I found it interesting to see that because of bad previous experience, Americans have a huge biais against diesel
Yep, the clouds of black smoke, the stench of the fumes, the GRINKGRINKGRINKGRINK sound that they make for no apparent reason -- and these are far from "previous" experience, the new ones are no different.
I would think that one reason for a presidential land-yacht to be diesel would be torque -- the things are heavily armored and I'm sure weigh a bunch. Diesel might make for faster getaways due to torque.
There is indeed often a tradeoff between security and utility, and sometimes increased security incents people to bypass rather that comply. The trick is to meet both goals at the same time -- sometimes that's possible and sometimes it isn't.
But in the end, like sensitivity / ethics training, security training isn't really about reducing the incidence of events -- it's about CYA on the company's part, so if there's a situation they can hold the employee accountable rather than having him/her weasel out with a "oh gee I didn't know" defense.
*Sigh*... I've worked with plenty of people like you before. Acting like an asshole
Who's the one namecalling here?
This is so UTTERLY MORONIC. That shiny new "ip helper" stuff is something I've been using for the past 15 years, and I don't recall it being new at the time. It sure as hell is 100% "reliable" and "predictable" in every possible way
Maybe for you, with whatever homogenous environment you have. IOS-XR bugs happen.
I've got hundreds and hundreds of systems depending on high-availability DHCP servers every single day
And you're telling *me* that I'm not a sysadmin? What bizarre fear do you have of static configuration?
EVERY DELL SERVER[...]
Dell? Seriously? Do you work in Hollywood setting up rows of servers for spy show shoots? I'll bet they're all in one room.
What you've "seen" is a lousy measure of anything
Because you're more important than me?
since you're spouting nothing but ignorance and nonsense left and right.
Oh right, I clearly am imagining the bugs in HP's iLO. And the PXE code on the shitty onboard NICs that shipped with the DL580G7. What happens in your DHCP wonderland when new systems are installed, you telepathically discover the MAC addresses, configure everything, and the box doesn't magically start taking SSH sessions? In your world remote hands never silently connect the wrong switch ports, connect the wrong server NIC, use a crossover cable by mistake, use the wrong jack on a patch panel? You never have bad cables, bad patch panel ports, bad switch ports, DOA server NICs?
That's idiotic. Get your PXE environment working right
My PXE environment works fine. It however can't work magic.
Why do you think you need Unicorns to configure a PXE boot server
Not what I said.
and OS kickstart deployment? That a big part of the SysAdmin's job.
Management would laugh me out of my job if I told them that I needed to fly around the world to do every system install personally.
It's damn clear you've never done any of this
Really? I must then have really vivid synthetic memories of my career, one which has seen attrition of countless erstwhile peers who didn't get it and couldn't work with others. Heck, you're probably one of them.
most basic best-practices in the enterprise world.
Setting phasers to "stun" and boinking green alien ladies is beyond the scope of this hissy fit.
Sounds like your half-assed company needs to find a halfway decent admin.
We have a number of them, and we're assed-enough to not buy Dell.
Playing dumb again? (Or are you playing?)
Customize the media any way you want it... Have it install an OS
And this media gets from me to the other side of the world how exactly?
enable a console on the serial ports
Any half-decent server has a working serial console out of the box.
Have it install the manufacturers [sic] binaries
Where exactly would I expect unskilled hands in Sofia, Bulgaria to source such a box, and which unicorn would configure it? Look in the mirror, Unicorn. Are you a sys admin or not? Some reason you refuse to do the job?
You're ragging on me, yet you think it's reasonable to fly between continents and try to hunt down a specific hackable box in Bulgaria?Open a window, you need more oxygen.
No extra VLANs needed
Yes, extra VLAN's needed, to have the extraneous little DHCP thing on the same network as each server. They both need to plug into the switch to talk to each other. Or does your network work over actual aether?
a decade after everyone else in the world replaced serial port OoBM with IPMI and SOL.
You really don't get the idea of worldwide unstaffed sites, do you?
Slashdot Mirror
Same in Seattle. There are 68,000 millionaires in this county, 4th in the whole country. Microsoft's practices have wildly inflated housing costs in the whole region.
The percentage of uranium in ore bodies that are mined tends to be pretty low as such things go -- lots and lots of ore gets extracted and processed to get those kg's of U, then it has to be enriched wrt U235 to be useful. The de-enriched aka "spent" U238 waste product is used to poison anyone we shoot artillery shells at.
I interviewed with Amazon once for a sysadmin job in the late 1990's or early 2000's. The position didn't even rate a cubicle, just a chair at a shared desk with an NCD16. I was expected to be on-call 24x7 and the salary was less than I was making at the time. They ended up not offering me the job because I didn't live downtown, less than 5 minutes from the office. I suspect that had I spoken hindi, looked down my nose at everyone, and worn grotty man-sandals they might have liked me better.
The Germans love driving. They love driving fast.
I have difficulty reconciling my wife's crumbling New Beetle with both of these ideas.
RSA was just an example
An out-of-date one, but yeah.
Each vendor has their own version
Of course -- IBM's IMM, Dell's DRAC, HP's iLO, Soracle's ILOM, generic stuff on certain Supermicro systems, etc.
It's completely pushbutton
... except for somehow learning those MAC's. I'm guessing that your hardware has a primary NIC MAC printed on the outside and your hardware monkeys are up to reading and reporting such? I don't have either of those luxuries, or necessarily a reliable way to DHCP, so I rely on a working serial console out of the box to statically configure IP on the service processor and to read the primary NIC's MAC. On a good day when IOS-XR, JunOS, etc. co-operate I can then configure relayed DHCP using the MAC to effect a kickstart, but so far every new location or piece of equipment presents a new and different way that the process is broken. Right now trying to figure out how to get an ex3300 switch to stop eating DHCP broadcasts and pass them upstream. Without a functional serial console all I could tell is that the thing wasn't working, with almost no way to troubleshoot.
What nonsense. Every hear of IBM's Remote Supervisor Adapter?
No, because it appears to be rather old. I believe that it was superseded by IMM.
Simple serial port access is handy but the x86 vendors aren't so stupid that they make you attach physical keyboards or even KVM concentrators.
Yes, actually, many of them are.
I've worked in environments where dozens of xSeries servers are provisioned daily without a single keyboard or monitor anywhere in the datacenter.
How? Reliance on DHCP being available? Some complex IBM-specific management application? Since you only have that one DC, how well would your setup work with 30 remote unstaffed locations?
1.) SPARC hardware is still WAY superior with remote management than any x86 POS I've ever managed. The ALOM on a SPARC
You're using hardware that old? My understanding (which could be flawed) is that the SPARC systems have used ILOM for a number of generations now.
and a serial cable from my Mac works EVERY time. When I worked in past shops managing thousands of Linux Dells and HP's we had nothing but issues with ILOs from the hardware and OS side. Just pure donkey shit.
I here you there. Modulo the stupid pause-on-Break behavior that went away quite a while ago, Sun has mostly understood remote management via serial console for years. This is something that Dell, IBM, and even Cisco people that I've talked to just don't understand. HP recently has shown some understanding and improvement: iLO 2 sucked hard, iLO 3 was a little better, but now iLO 4 version 1.10+ works reasonably well for initial setup via serial console and subsequently the HTTP interface once one figures out how to configure IP, but before that I saw all sorts of crap, and entering the curses-style ORCA even today from the console is nearly impossible. I still haven't figured out a way to get a real host console when SSHing to iLO, but the serial connection mostly works now, once we found an adapter that works on their anachronistic DB9 connector. I demo'd an IBM system last year, and even IBM's techs couldn't give me a way to make the serial console work.
When you're a start-up buying used hardware it is a great way to cut cost where investors/owners LOVE. Frankly SPARC hardware in my experience can keep on chugging where those HPs and Dells are falling apart right and left. I don't have time to be fucking with hardware when I'm running the show of a million hats.
FWIW HP hardware has been reliable for us so far. We were stuck with a number of G6 systems that are mostly gone, a few G7's and quite a few G8's now. My experience has been that the G8 systems are massively better than what preceded them. The DL580 G7 on the other hand, I have little confidence in.
For each new x86 hardware update for Linux, it's a whole new 'testing' to make sure it doesn't blow up the OS on the next reboot. Never had that with SPARC of maintained properly.
I've seen a couple of Solaris patch bundles over the years that could render a system unbootable (modulo netbooting or an alternate LU environment), and in the last year a couple of stupid RHEL/Linux kernel bugs that also could render a system unbootable (no LU or way to revert changes, only a netboot rescue environment)
4.) Virtualization is WAY superior than KVM or VMWare. I've used many of the OpenSource VM solutions and frankly non compare to the control that I can do with either LDOMs or Solaris Containers/zones.
I haven't personally played with Linux virtualization, but my experience with zones was disappointing.
5.) ZFS yeah, Linux we hear your promises of a bad-ass filesystem, I'm still waiting.
Damn straight. Btrfs sure isn't it. I set one up recently to test it, and found that for the thing to mount at boot-time I had to enumerate all of the component disks in the friggin' fstab, and then enabling compression resulted in space utilization *inflating* by 2x, compared to 20x compression that ZFS gets on the same data.
The world isn't one big LAMP stack.
Agreed.
So, just as an example, the IBM x3750 M4 doesn't exist? It has 32 cores and can go up to 1.5TB of RAM. It is less than $50K.
It also needs a legacy keyboard and video monitor to install, and lacks any working serial console. It's a desktop that comes with (bizarre) rack rails.
I think you are right. If it absolutely must work at all costs then Sun made sense. Otherwise Cent OS on X86 or something similar is good enough.
... so long as your needs don't include storage. Linux storage is friggin *pathetic. Separate layers for RAID, volumes, and filesystem, with none of them particularly easy to manage. In 2013 there still isn't a single compressing filesystem. Sun's ZFS and the stability of Solaris were invaluable, but they shot themselves in the foot business-wise, then Oracle came in and chopped off the whole metaphorical leg.
Ok , here's one. Albeit a few years ago.. We were having a lot of sad times with the Sun V880. We wanted faster Disk I/O along with a more usable OS. Solaris 9 (& 10), at the time, would boot and run Oracle but it was impossible to get patches for it. We used to download them from Sun's website but then all of a sudden you needed a Vendor ID.
What's a "Vendor ID"? Patch bundles used to be publicly available but that tightened up IIRC before Oracle took over. All one needed for access was a support contract. I used wget to grab Solaris patches years ago and I still do today. Even without a contract the patch bundles were readily available elsewhere with a modest amount of effort.
I have not heard one single source say they were leaving SPARC because of performance concerns.
We did, partly, and that was long before the Oracle buyout. Sun stopped selling a basic SPARC system for general-purpose applications. They either didn't want to bother creating new chips with per-core performance, or more likely couldn't, so they went with the niche CMT approach instead, which was useless to us, and made the entry point ludicrously expensive. Lacking any viable SPARC systems, we went to the x4100/x4200 etc modules which worked well.
The shops that buy SPARC equipment do not have price of servers as a primary concern. Everyone who's left has left because of Oracle.
Clearly you do not in fact know the motivations of "everyone".
Oracle is going to need to come up with a new game to make waves with the new processor. Simply improving a processor isn't going to change the fact that what people want are low cost processors without vendor lock in.
Larry has stated explicitly that he does not want to be in the "low end" and general-purpose server markets. This is one reason why we reluctantly gave up on Sun/Oracle hardware. Another is that dealing with Sun was always painful and Oracle made that several times worse. Last Sun/Oracle hardware we bought was an x4270m2. It took a couple of months to find a VAR who could even quote the thing, and even then Oracle demanded a description of why we wanted to buy the thing and what we wanted to use it for before they would give the VAR permission to quote. Clearly they do not want our business.
Sun made a name for itself with interesting hardware, but that was before processing power was a commodity.
Well-made, easily-racked, easily-managed servers still aren't a commodity, and Solaris still blows Linux away in a number of areas.
There's little that the hardware and their database can do that can't be replicated by x64 and something like Postgres with some thought behind your architecture.
Um, you do realize I hope that Sun/Oracle have sold x64 systems for years. We've been running Postgres on them for ~8 years.
For certain, the features they do have are not cost effective against the hundreds of thousands of dollars you pay for Oracle DB licensing, and the premium you pay for SPARC hardware and support.
Again, Sun/Oracle != SPARC, and the hardware is not dedicated to Oracle's DB.
Curious that NATO needed a subtropical swimming pool.
We mostly build spacecraft out of titanium, not iron, no?
More likely they've found a lost Russian nuclear sub and this is their equivalent of Azorian.
When you consider that most people who use VM's do so because it's trendy rather than out of any real need, their pricing makes sense.
You mentioned the unspeakable horror of P****n, what did you expect?
When I bought my LCD/LED to replace the DLP that broke (Fuck you very much, Samsung!) I saved hundreds by forgoing 3D and hundreds more by forgoing the yellow-pixel foo. YMMV.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
I found it interesting to see that because of bad previous experience, Americans have a huge biais against diesel
Yep, the clouds of black smoke, the stench of the fumes, the GRINKGRINKGRINKGRINK sound that they make for no apparent reason -- and these are far from "previous" experience, the new ones are no different. I would think that one reason for a presidential land-yacht to be diesel would be torque -- the things are heavily armored and I'm sure weigh a bunch. Diesel might make for faster getaways due to torque.
There is indeed often a tradeoff between security and utility, and sometimes increased security incents people to bypass rather that comply. The trick is to meet both goals at the same time -- sometimes that's possible and sometimes it isn't. But in the end, like sensitivity / ethics training, security training isn't really about reducing the incidence of events -- it's about CYA on the company's part, so if there's a situation they can hold the employee accountable rather than having him/her weasel out with a "oh gee I didn't know" defense.
On behalf of my son: fuck you.
Too bad it refuses to talk IMAP properly.
Or maybe because he elects to call himself "Elon Musk", which sounds like either a cologne made from anal glad secretions, or an FLDS bigamist?
*Sigh*... I've worked with plenty of people like you before. Acting like an asshole
Who's the one namecalling here?
This is so UTTERLY MORONIC. That shiny new "ip helper" stuff is something I've been using for the past 15 years, and I don't recall it being new at the time. It sure as hell is 100% "reliable" and "predictable" in every possible way
Maybe for you, with whatever homogenous environment you have. IOS-XR bugs happen.
I've got hundreds and hundreds of systems depending on high-availability DHCP servers every single day
And you're telling *me* that I'm not a sysadmin? What bizarre fear do you have of static configuration?
EVERY DELL SERVER[...]
Dell? Seriously? Do you work in Hollywood setting up rows of servers for spy show shoots? I'll bet they're all in one room.
What you've "seen" is a lousy measure of anything
Because you're more important than me?
since you're spouting nothing but ignorance and nonsense left and right.
Oh right, I clearly am imagining the bugs in HP's iLO. And the PXE code on the shitty onboard NICs that shipped with the DL580G7. What happens in your DHCP wonderland when new systems are installed, you telepathically discover the MAC addresses, configure everything, and the box doesn't magically start taking SSH sessions? In your world remote hands never silently connect the wrong switch ports, connect the wrong server NIC, use a crossover cable by mistake, use the wrong jack on a patch panel? You never have bad cables, bad patch panel ports, bad switch ports, DOA server NICs?
That's idiotic. Get your PXE environment working right
My PXE environment works fine. It however can't work magic.
Why do you think you need Unicorns to configure a PXE boot server
Not what I said.
and OS kickstart deployment? That a big part of the SysAdmin's job.
Management would laugh me out of my job if I told them that I needed to fly around the world to do every system install personally.
It's damn clear you've never done any of this
Really? I must then have really vivid synthetic memories of my career, one which has seen attrition of countless erstwhile peers who didn't get it and couldn't work with others. Heck, you're probably one of them.
most basic best-practices in the enterprise world.
Setting phasers to "stun" and boinking green alien ladies is beyond the scope of this hissy fit.
Sounds like your half-assed company needs to find a halfway decent admin.
We have a number of them, and we're assed-enough to not buy Dell.
Playing dumb again? (Or are you playing?)
Customize the media any way you want it... Have it install an OS
And this media gets from me to the other side of the world how exactly?
enable a console on the serial ports
Any half-decent server has a working serial console out of the box.
Have it install the manufacturers [sic] binaries
Where exactly would I expect unskilled hands in Sofia, Bulgaria to source such a box, and which unicorn would configure it? Look in the mirror, Unicorn. Are you a sys admin or not? Some reason you refuse to do the job?
You're ragging on me, yet you think it's reasonable to fly between continents and try to hunt down a specific hackable box in Bulgaria?Open a window, you need more oxygen.
No extra VLANs needed
Yes, extra VLAN's needed, to have the extraneous little DHCP thing on the same network as each server. They both need to plug into the switch to talk to each other. Or does your network work over actual aether?
a decade after everyone else in the world replaced serial port OoBM with IPMI and SOL.
You really don't get the idea of worldwide unstaffed sites, do you?