On 23/03/2011 00:10, Roderick A. Anderson wrote:
> But before I plan another trip to the colo (35 miles) to update all the
> machines there I hoping for some reassurance that that it was just a bad
> day for me and kernels. :-)
On an unrelated note I have bought boards with IPMI onboard, and now
there is zero reason to be near them or not for upgrades or even
installing the OS. You can get full serial port access (or VGA access
if you need it), power control and even get into the bios and watch the
bios boot pages
The only thing which is inconvenient is the remote media mounting, so I
instead bought some micro USB sticks and these live inside the machine.
I set my grub boot to boot from the USB (and I can change the bios to
boot from the USB if necessary) and it's my failover image in case of
boot issues. I used sysrescuecd for my usb boot, but anything should
work really (just get the architecture the same as your main image)
To be sure it all worked well I never put a keyboard or screen on the
machines and the initial install was all done with the machines
completely remote. Can't say enough good things about such a setup for
Colo, or even just for server rooms where it's a walk to get to the
screen and keyboard?
Good luck
Ed W
P.S. I went supermicro, but I gather Dell, Intel and HP all offer IPMI
enabled machines and I think it's even trickling down to a few consumer
boards now
Received on Wed Mar 23 10:24:37 2011