I don't know why you're having these millions of insurmountable problems with OoBM,
Um, I made no such claim.
but I can assure you, it's only you... everyone else in the world has things working just fine.
Wow, you know EVERYONE ELSE? Your friend count on Facebook must be just sick!
Rack a server, plug in the power and ethernet cables, then use the front panel LCD menu to assign the static IP address for each one if you don't like DHCP, maybe set the password depending on vendor, and get the hell out of there.
Maybe set the password? Why on earth would I want to leave it set to admin/changeme? Only front-panel IP address setting I've seen has been on old laser printers and crappy Infortrend RAID arrays. Liking or not liking DHCP is moot. Servers are not desktops, there rarely is a local server available. Recently "ip helper" router config foo can sometimes relay DHCP broadcasts to a remote server, but this is far from reliable and the config needed to work on a given router/interface is far from predictable.
Or you can plug in video and keyboard to do it via the BIOS screen prompts.
5790 miles between here and Bucharest. That's an awfully long USB cable.
Done it with hundreds and hundreds of servers without issue
Because you were in the same building/state/country/continent as them, right?
You start with a pxelinux config with serial console.
Um, no. You start with a serial console, then if firmware bugs don't prevent it, you configure static addressing, IP address/netmask/gateway, user/pass, and hope that the network cables and connections are right and working.
Then one of your menu options is Linux/BSD with the appropriate configuration already set.
If one's forced to run a Linux or BSD... and if some unicorn magically makes that configuration. You're skipping a bunch of bootstrapping.
You've got to customize your distribution anyhow, so a couple config changes to get a serial console is nothing.
Again, how? Jedi Mind Tricks are unreliable.
" All you need is for a DHCP server to magically be available."
Nothing magical about it. If you've got more than one server on the network
Usually, no./30 directly connected to a router port. Again, not desktops in an office, not some lame mom's-basement gamer party. And even if there were a DHCP server, that just shifts the issue because it would need to be configured itself.
Somebody is out there physically racking the servers and running the wires.
Yep, often in the middle of the night, my local time, often I don't have direct contact with them, and if I did, my technical Malay and Hungarian is realllly rusty. Even in the US (eg. Houston) I can't count on English fluency. Or on them having a laptop or legacy keyboard/mouse/VGA monitor in their pocket.
Somebody is ordering the stuff, handling delivery and unboxing.
At least three different people there, in at least two different countries.
Giving one of them a customized DVD or USB flash drive to insert is trivial
No, it isn't. Again, the world is a bigger place than a one-building office. DVD's also require a drive, which rarely exists any more. But what good would a USB flash drive do anyway?
You make it sound as if servers just spring into exisitence in the farthest corners of the world, attached to some random internet link.
Pretty much, yeah.
And if you are actually supporting lone systems stashed on dstant [sic] networks, I recomend supplamenting [sic] it with a $40 DD-WRT box with a large USB drive plugged-in, acting as a DHCP/pxe server
All you need to do is give the OoBM interface an IP address (perhaps a DHCP reservation) and you're good to go.
"You too can be a MILLIONAIRE, and never pay taxes! First step: get a million dollars"
This is one place where server manufacturers all too often mistake rackmount servers for desktops. I demo'd an IBM x-something system last year and the thing was a non-starter. Serial console didn't work out of the box, and even the elaborate legacy-KVM steps they came up with couldn't make the thing work. Talked to Cisco about their UCS systems, and they thoroughly were incapable of understanding. "Just hook up a laptop". Kinda hard to do from the other side of the planet.
Last I looked at Dell theirs didn't work out of the box either. HP started doing that a couple of generations ago, and with very recent firmware revisions it's reached almost the point where Sun's ILOM was 10 years ago.
Even if you're running on desktop-class hardware, you can still fake OoBM pretty well with a serial port. Linux/BSD/etc., will bring-up the serial port as the console as soon as the bootloader starts up, if configured to do so
How would it be configured? Jedi mind tricks?
And if the disk has failed, or otherwise your bootloader doesn't work, hopefully your bios is set to PXE boot, and your pxelinux configuration will give you a serial console as soon as that kicks-in.
All you need is for a DHCP server to magically be available. Oh and for a non-brain-dead PXE implemention, ie, something different from the HP DL580 G7, where the goofy-ass thing forces the console to 115200 bps for no apparent reason.
If you've never experienced the problems then you might not appreciate why but if you have, it becomes rather clear.
Having experienced "the problems" (not to be confused with The Troubles) I can state with confidence that I am very, very glad that I've never had to hassle with lame and expensive external KVM units. Administrative consoles for servers need to be serial. They need to Just Work. Plug a few dozen of them into a Cisco 2621 or whatever. Redirected KVM over the network really should be the first section of the Wikipedia article for "kludge". Servers are not workstations. Think cheap-ass beige boxes make financial sense? Factor in the cost, hassle, and space required for some lame-ass Raritan KVM system and the economy is less clear.
That said, any half-decent server built in the last ten years has a service processor onboard that provides a network SSH CLI and KVM redirection to support legacy crap. But I won't buy one that doesn't have a serial console for bootstrapping/recovery. Sun's had this for years. HP has too, though their progress toward complete usability has been slow but with ilo 4 1.10+ it's mostly there. IBM's a joke, and to my surprise so are the Cisco UCS servers.
A backup that can be readily stolen/damaged/burned/flooded/etc at the same time as the original isn't much of a backup. Real backups need to be offsite.
When considering bandwidth needed for network backups, don't make the mistake of assuming that an anachronistic full dump has to be done again and again every week/month/whatever. Modern software only sends changes and makes appropriate use of deduplication and compression. I have 1+TB backed up with CrashPlan over a business-class cable connection. It took something like a month to complete the initial full backup, but "incrementals forever" complete quickly. Few people in the SOHO realm churn their data enough to overwhelm such a strategy. If they do, their architecture needs work -- hosted on the other side of the pipe, etc.
That experience wasn't limited to dialup. I found that at least half of what was on Napster were truncated files. Botched spelling was common, and metadata if at all present was usually also botched.
Much easier to just buy / rip a used CD.
.Am I getting compensated for the space that corporate is taking up in my home, my bandwidth, power, utilities
Are you too lazy to spend 60 seconds a month filing an expense report for the connectivity? I get a business-class connection at home paid for. As for power -- this is 2013 - a laptop doesn't take all that much power, nor does an external LED/LCD monitor. Utilities -- if you're too lazy to deduct them from your taxes, that's up to you, but the delta between your utility cost with/without working at home is going to be fairly small, certainly smaller than the 60 cents / mile cost of driving to/from an office.
and the intrusion into my family's space?
What intrusion? You're going to have a computer at home anyway, right? Are you REALLY that hard up for the ~96 in^3 that my laptop takes?
I'm sorry, saving 2 hours of travel time isn't enough to compensate for that
Must suck to be your family since you value them so little.
Many view travel time as time wasted - for me it is my stress decompression time
Clearly you enjoy bumper-to-bumper traffic more than I do.
self-care
Doing that while driving is both illegal and messy
People who nominally sit in office buildings are just as likely or more to be away: off-site for lunch, in someone else's office, out shopping. By "when they should be working" I assume you mean some 9-5 rigid timeframe? My whole group telecommutes, and I routinely am able to find people in our jabber room before/after their local 9-5 hours.
We have a sales office where I could sit, but I don't work *with* any of those sharks, and it would burn two hours every day at least for me to go to/from. More yet on the days when I have to watch my son, go to ABA team meetings, my son waking up too early because I'd have to shower before leaving etc. Having to sit in traffic for 2+ hours a day would not improve my work, and would be incompatible with my autistic son's needs.
It's also a *lot* harder in a cubicle (or worse, just tables jammed together like we have in our London office) to disable the overhead lights. Most offices I've been in are massively overlit.
I'll think about it the next time I have to drive ten miles to the nearest UPS office to pick up an envelope, compared to five blocks downtown to the post office
Envelopes are available at places other than UPS storefronts. Even if you're after the UPS-labeled ones, you need only request on their web site and they'll ship you a bunch
To deduct medical expenses, they have to be in excess of 7.5% of your AGI. In 2012, that would mean you would need an AGI below $26,667 to be able to deduct any of your medical expense. Even with an AGI of $26,667, it is very unusaul for your itemized deductions to exceed the standard deduction, not impossible, but unusual, so if you did deduct $2,000 in medical expenses on your itemized deductions, you might want to check your tax return before the IRS does.
Clarification: there is a threshold above which medical expenses are deductible, and only that part of the total above the threshold is deductible; the above could be interpreted as saying that once one reached the threshold, all are deductible.
For 2011 the threshold was 7.5% -- a while before that it was 8%. For 2012 / 2013 the threshold has jumped to 10%. For 2012 I had close to $19k of direct medical expenses plus 1100+ miles and the difference between the 7.5% I had been expecting and the 10% reality was significant -- and it's possible that 2014 and beyond will be higher, or lower -- they aren't set yet.
Many people don't know about the medical stuff or what all is legit, including miles spent driving to/from, parking, etc.
There's still a sales tax deduction, one can deduct either actual totals or some standard sort of estimate given the tedium of bookkeeping for something that can measure just cents per transaction. Buying cars, major appliances, etc. can make the former more appealing.
Charitable donations can be deduced, some other taxes/fees (eg. my Sewage Facility Capacity charge), home improvements, unreimbursed business expenses over a certain threshold (like utilities when one works from home) etc. In many cases it is true that someone paying a mortgage in addition to all the other valid itemizations readily beats the standard deduction.
How much different would the situation be if balkanization weren't so encouraged, if humans could spend time fixing stuff instead of reinventing the wheel?
Eg. consider the number of tools for managing disk partition tables. Consider how many of them can't handle everything, are hobbled with an X11 interface (gparted), or simply are broken (cfdisk). Now look at Solaris where 'format' does it all and more.
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I just want to get in my fucking hotel room as fast as is humanly possible.
... without having to learn Spanish to boot
I don't know why you're having these millions of insurmountable problems with OoBM,
Um, I made no such claim.
but I can assure you, it's only you... everyone else in the world has things working just fine.
Wow, you know EVERYONE ELSE? Your friend count on Facebook must be just sick!
Rack a server, plug in the power and ethernet cables, then use the front panel LCD menu to assign the static IP address for each one if you don't like DHCP, maybe set the password depending on vendor, and get the hell out of there.
Maybe set the password? Why on earth would I want to leave it set to admin/changeme? Only front-panel IP address setting I've seen has been on old laser printers and crappy Infortrend RAID arrays. Liking or not liking DHCP is moot. Servers are not desktops, there rarely is a local server available. Recently "ip helper" router config foo can sometimes relay DHCP broadcasts to a remote server, but this is far from reliable and the config needed to work on a given router/interface is far from predictable.
Or you can plug in video and keyboard to do it via the BIOS screen prompts.
5790 miles between here and Bucharest. That's an awfully long USB cable.
Done it with hundreds and hundreds of servers without issue
Because you were in the same building/state/country/continent as them, right?
You start with a pxelinux config with serial console.
Um, no. You start with a serial console, then if firmware bugs don't prevent it, you configure static addressing, IP address/netmask/gateway, user/pass, and hope that the network cables and connections are right and working.
Then one of your menu options is Linux/BSD with the appropriate configuration already set.
If one's forced to run a Linux or BSD ... and if some unicorn magically makes that configuration. You're skipping a bunch of bootstrapping.
You've got to customize your distribution anyhow, so a couple config changes to get a serial console is nothing.
Again, how? Jedi Mind Tricks are unreliable.
" All you need is for a DHCP server to magically be available."
Nothing magical about it. If you've got more than one server on the network
Usually, no. /30 directly connected to a router port. Again, not desktops in an office, not some lame mom's-basement gamer party. And even if there were a DHCP server, that just shifts the issue because it would need to be configured itself.
Somebody is out there physically racking the servers and running the wires.
Yep, often in the middle of the night, my local time, often I don't have direct contact with them, and if I did, my technical Malay and Hungarian is realllly rusty. Even in the US (eg. Houston) I can't count on English fluency. Or on them having a laptop or legacy keyboard/mouse/VGA monitor in their pocket.
Somebody is ordering the stuff, handling delivery and unboxing.
At least three different people there, in at least two different countries.
Giving one of them a customized DVD or USB flash drive to insert is trivial
No, it isn't. Again, the world is a bigger place than a one-building office. DVD's also require a drive, which rarely exists any more. But what good would a USB flash drive do anyway?
You make it sound as if servers just spring into exisitence in the farthest corners of the world, attached to some random internet link.
Pretty much, yeah.
And if you are actually supporting lone systems stashed on dstant [sic] networks, I recomend supplamenting [sic] it with a $40 DD-WRT box with a large USB drive plugged-in, acting as a DHCP/pxe server
All you need to do is give the OoBM interface an IP address (perhaps a DHCP reservation) and you're good to go.
"You too can be a MILLIONAIRE, and never pay taxes! First step: get a million dollars" This is one place where server manufacturers all too often mistake rackmount servers for desktops. I demo'd an IBM x-something system last year and the thing was a non-starter. Serial console didn't work out of the box, and even the elaborate legacy-KVM steps they came up with couldn't make the thing work. Talked to Cisco about their UCS systems, and they thoroughly were incapable of understanding. "Just hook up a laptop". Kinda hard to do from the other side of the planet. Last I looked at Dell theirs didn't work out of the box either. HP started doing that a couple of generations ago, and with very recent firmware revisions it's reached almost the point where Sun's ILOM was 10 years ago.
Even if you're running on desktop-class hardware, you can still fake OoBM pretty well with a serial port. Linux/BSD/etc., will bring-up the serial port as the console as soon as the bootloader starts up, if configured to do so
How would it be configured? Jedi mind tricks?
And if the disk has failed, or otherwise your bootloader doesn't work, hopefully your bios is set to PXE boot, and your pxelinux configuration will give you a serial console as soon as that kicks-in.
All you need is for a DHCP server to magically be available. Oh and for a non-brain-dead PXE implemention, ie, something different from the HP DL580 G7, where the goofy-ass thing forces the console to 115200 bps for no apparent reason.
The awesomeness of a keyboard that one can't try out in person is limited, especially when it perpetuates the Capslock/control stupidity.
If you've never experienced the problems then you might not appreciate why but if you have, it becomes rather clear.
Having experienced "the problems" (not to be confused with The Troubles) I can state with confidence that I am very, very glad that I've never had to hassle with lame and expensive external KVM units. Administrative consoles for servers need to be serial. They need to Just Work. Plug a few dozen of them into a Cisco 2621 or whatever. Redirected KVM over the network really should be the first section of the Wikipedia article for "kludge". Servers are not workstations. Think cheap-ass beige boxes make financial sense? Factor in the cost, hassle, and space required for some lame-ass Raritan KVM system and the economy is less clear. That said, any half-decent server built in the last ten years has a service processor onboard that provides a network SSH CLI and KVM redirection to support legacy crap. But I won't buy one that doesn't have a serial console for bootstrapping/recovery. Sun's had this for years. HP has too, though their progress toward complete usability has been slow but with ilo 4 1.10+ it's mostly there. IBM's a joke, and to my surprise so are the Cisco UCS servers.
I brought up IP on FW once. The kernel crashed repeatedly.
A backup that can be readily stolen/damaged/burned/flooded/etc at the same time as the original isn't much of a backup. Real backups need to be offsite. When considering bandwidth needed for network backups, don't make the mistake of assuming that an anachronistic full dump has to be done again and again every week/month/whatever. Modern software only sends changes and makes appropriate use of deduplication and compression. I have 1+TB backed up with CrashPlan over a business-class cable connection. It took something like a month to complete the initial full backup, but "incrementals forever" complete quickly. Few people in the SOHO realm churn their data enough to overwhelm such a strategy. If they do, their architecture needs work -- hosted on the other side of the pipe, etc.
Don't remember where I got it, but it came with some "babylon toolbar" thing that was a nightmare to remove.
That experience wasn't limited to dialup. I found that at least half of what was on Napster were truncated files. Botched spelling was common, and metadata if at all present was usually also botched. Much easier to just buy / rip a used CD.
.Am I getting compensated for the space that corporate is taking up in my home, my bandwidth, power, utilities
Are you too lazy to spend 60 seconds a month filing an expense report for the connectivity? I get a business-class connection at home paid for. As for power -- this is 2013 - a laptop doesn't take all that much power, nor does an external LED/LCD monitor. Utilities -- if you're too lazy to deduct them from your taxes, that's up to you, but the delta between your utility cost with/without working at home is going to be fairly small, certainly smaller than the 60 cents / mile cost of driving to/from an office.
and the intrusion into my family's space?
What intrusion? You're going to have a computer at home anyway, right? Are you REALLY that hard up for the ~96 in^3 that my laptop takes?
I'm sorry, saving 2 hours of travel time isn't enough to compensate for that
Must suck to be your family since you value them so little.
Many view travel time as time wasted - for me it is my stress decompression time
Clearly you enjoy bumper-to-bumper traffic more than I do.
self-care
Doing that while driving is both illegal and messy
People who nominally sit in office buildings are just as likely or more to be away: off-site for lunch, in someone else's office, out shopping. By "when they should be working" I assume you mean some 9-5 rigid timeframe? My whole group telecommutes, and I routinely am able to find people in our jabber room before/after their local 9-5 hours. We have a sales office where I could sit, but I don't work *with* any of those sharks, and it would burn two hours every day at least for me to go to/from. More yet on the days when I have to watch my son, go to ABA team meetings, my son waking up too early because I'd have to shower before leaving etc. Having to sit in traffic for 2+ hours a day would not improve my work, and would be incompatible with my autistic son's needs.
It's also a *lot* harder in a cubicle (or worse, just tables jammed together like we have in our London office) to disable the overhead lights. Most offices I've been in are massively overlit.
Did your copy come with a trojan like the one I installed on a VM did?
I'll think about it the next time I have to drive ten miles to the nearest UPS office to pick up an envelope, compared to five blocks downtown to the post office
Envelopes are available at places other than UPS storefronts. Even if you're after the UPS-labeled ones, you need only request on their web site and they'll ship you a bunch
... and with that he's going to buy 4 redundant TV's, but not replace the laptops? WTF?
Moreover, having once driven a Renault I cannot believe that one was capable of reaching 125 other than in freefall. Maybe 125 kph?
Thank you -- beat me to that one.
Is your bumble-barf consumption really high enough that the price different matters?
To deduct medical expenses, they have to be in excess of 7.5% of your AGI. In 2012, that would mean you would need an AGI below $26,667 to be able to deduct any of your medical expense. Even with an AGI of $26,667, it is very unusaul for your itemized deductions to exceed the standard deduction, not impossible, but unusual, so if you did deduct $2,000 in medical expenses on your itemized deductions, you might want to check your tax return before the IRS does.
Clarification: there is a threshold above which medical expenses are deductible, and only that part of the total above the threshold is deductible; the above could be interpreted as saying that once one reached the threshold, all are deductible. For 2011 the threshold was 7.5% -- a while before that it was 8%. For 2012 / 2013 the threshold has jumped to 10%. For 2012 I had close to $19k of direct medical expenses plus 1100+ miles and the difference between the 7.5% I had been expecting and the 10% reality was significant -- and it's possible that 2014 and beyond will be higher, or lower -- they aren't set yet. Many people don't know about the medical stuff or what all is legit, including miles spent driving to/from, parking, etc. There's still a sales tax deduction, one can deduct either actual totals or some standard sort of estimate given the tedium of bookkeeping for something that can measure just cents per transaction. Buying cars, major appliances, etc. can make the former more appealing. Charitable donations can be deduced, some other taxes/fees (eg. my Sewage Facility Capacity charge), home improvements, unreimbursed business expenses over a certain threshold (like utilities when one works from home) etc. In many cases it is true that someone paying a mortgage in addition to all the other valid itemizations readily beats the standard deduction.
Who said anything about tables?
M-x miss-point. Monitoring entails connection attempts from the monitoring server, which are impossible if one blocks them.
How much different would the situation be if balkanization weren't so encouraged, if humans could spend time fixing stuff instead of reinventing the wheel? Eg. consider the number of tools for managing disk partition tables. Consider how many of them can't handle everything, are hobbled with an X11 interface (gparted), or simply are broken (cfdisk). Now look at Solaris where 'format' does it all and more.
Yet it's still line-oriented, a throwback to punchcards.
Don't monitor your servers, do you?
... or if Captain Jack seeks to have sex with it