On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 10:24:25AM +0000, Ed W wrote:
> 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
I've been on that train for a while now. I don't deploy any
boxes without IPMI with full KVM and remote media anymore.
> 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
I've installed e.g. Debian remotely, so it's possible. But you could
also just do netboot from local network. I do have rescue on USB
as well, some of it with internal USB ports. I also use internal USB
sticks for VMWare ESXi for our Dell boxes.
> 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
Interesting -- is this Supermicro, or somebody else?
-- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BEReceived on Wed Mar 23 10:29:49 2011