Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP
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Playing at being in business....
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@Pete-S said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@Dashrender said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@travisdh1 said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@dafyre said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
I like the idea of something like this. I admit that some of the points (such as powering the device) are good ones.
I think something like this could be huge for the team I work on. We do have to go physically visit the servers every now and again to fix a botched VMware upgrade (rare, but it happens) or what-have you. Having something like this would be great. Connect the PiKVM to wireless so we don't have to dig out a monitor, mouse, keyboard, and power cable and find something to sit it on.
We then could go back to the admin machines (or back to our office!) and connect to the PiKVM over wireless. No muss, no fuss.
Couldn't you power the PiKVM with battery, or via the USB connection that it uses to connect up for the keyboard & mouse as well. OR a second USB connection for power instead.
If available, you can run a pi with a PoE to 5v usb adapter. I had a rPI3 B+ that I used that way for a long time. That's assuming you have a network port to provide the power.
The disadvantage to useing iDRAC / iLO, etc al, in our case is that we just don't have enough network ports to do that. Plus iLO & iDRAC are all 1gig connections and all of our switches are 10gig.
10gb network switches should all work at 1gb as well. Now the not enough network ports is at least understandable.
Is it though? Presumably critical infrastructure.. and you can't buy an additional switch to get iLo online?
One single 48 port 1 gigabit L2 switch will cover a full rack. Not only for server OOB management but also for other devices that might have a management port, such as switches and firewalls. Minuscule cost compared to the servers and the rest of the rack.
But it won't support that full rack and the floorplan as well.
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@Dashrender said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@travisdh1 said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@dafyre said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
I like the idea of something like this. I admit that some of the points (such as powering the device) are good ones.
I think something like this could be huge for the team I work on. We do have to go physically visit the servers every now and again to fix a botched VMware upgrade (rare, but it happens) or what-have you. Having something like this would be great. Connect the PiKVM to wireless so we don't have to dig out a monitor, mouse, keyboard, and power cable and find something to sit it on.
We then could go back to the admin machines (or back to our office!) and connect to the PiKVM over wireless. No muss, no fuss.
Couldn't you power the PiKVM with battery, or via the USB connection that it uses to connect up for the keyboard & mouse as well. OR a second USB connection for power instead.
If available, you can run a pi with a PoE to 5v usb adapter. I had a rPI3 B+ that I used that way for a long time. That's assuming you have a network port to provide the power.
The disadvantage to useing iDRAC / iLO, etc al, in our case is that we just don't have enough network ports to do that. Plus iLO & iDRAC are all 1gig connections and all of our switches are 10gig.
10gb network switches should all work at 1gb as well. Now the not enough network ports is at least understandable.
Is it though? Presumably critical infrastructure.. and you can't buy an additional switch to get iLo online?
For the amount of time we spend over there physically sitting in front of the machines, along with the cost of the brand switches (Cisco, if you couldn't guess), cost of the the licensing to get the full iDRAC for "virtual cdrom", cabling it all and all that, it just doesn't make sense -- at least not to me, and not in the face of something like a $200 PiKVM that we could use wirelessly -- or an IP-KVM that needs one network cable per rack or two.
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@dafyre said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@Dashrender said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@travisdh1 said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@dafyre said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
I like the idea of something like this. I admit that some of the points (such as powering the device) are good ones.
I think something like this could be huge for the team I work on. We do have to go physically visit the servers every now and again to fix a botched VMware upgrade (rare, but it happens) or what-have you. Having something like this would be great. Connect the PiKVM to wireless so we don't have to dig out a monitor, mouse, keyboard, and power cable and find something to sit it on.
We then could go back to the admin machines (or back to our office!) and connect to the PiKVM over wireless. No muss, no fuss.
Couldn't you power the PiKVM with battery, or via the USB connection that it uses to connect up for the keyboard & mouse as well. OR a second USB connection for power instead.
If available, you can run a pi with a PoE to 5v usb adapter. I had a rPI3 B+ that I used that way for a long time. That's assuming you have a network port to provide the power.
The disadvantage to useing iDRAC / iLO, etc al, in our case is that we just don't have enough network ports to do that. Plus iLO & iDRAC are all 1gig connections and all of our switches are 10gig.
10gb network switches should all work at 1gb as well. Now the not enough network ports is at least understandable.
Is it though? Presumably critical infrastructure.. and you can't buy an additional switch to get iLo online?
For the amount of time we spend over there physically sitting in front of the machines, along with the cost of the brand switches (Cisco, if you couldn't guess), cost of the the licensing to get the full iDRAC for "virtual cdrom", cabling it all and all that, it just doesn't make sense -- at least not to me, and not in the face of something like a $200 PiKVM that we could use wirelessly -- or an IP-KVM that needs one network cable per rack or two.
Yeah, this is a double edged sword for sure! If you live relatively close and work on site with the equipment, then savings might be worth it.
I had a conversation with my new boss yesterday about an outage we recently had. He asked the expected question - what could we do to prevent this from happening in the future? (the server crashed - I believe a software issue, but haven't parsed the logs yet, then the system wouldn't boot any more from the USB stick (corrupt boot sector)) He pressed on said - well maybe there wasn't anything that could have been done? I said - well, we could have a fully redundant server with replicated data, etc - but at the cost of $20-30K I didn't feel it was worth the expense, since a 4 hour outage likely doesn't come close to closing us that in revenue (any lost appointments/surgeries are rescheduled in short order.
Additionally - I plugged my plans to move us to a zero trust model, hopefully with zero or near zero local servers will make this a non issue as well. -
@Dashrender said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@dafyre said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@Dashrender said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@travisdh1 said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@dafyre said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
I like the idea of something like this. I admit that some of the points (such as powering the device) are good ones.
I think something like this could be huge for the team I work on. We do have to go physically visit the servers every now and again to fix a botched VMware upgrade (rare, but it happens) or what-have you. Having something like this would be great. Connect the PiKVM to wireless so we don't have to dig out a monitor, mouse, keyboard, and power cable and find something to sit it on.
We then could go back to the admin machines (or back to our office!) and connect to the PiKVM over wireless. No muss, no fuss.
Couldn't you power the PiKVM with battery, or via the USB connection that it uses to connect up for the keyboard & mouse as well. OR a second USB connection for power instead.
If available, you can run a pi with a PoE to 5v usb adapter. I had a rPI3 B+ that I used that way for a long time. That's assuming you have a network port to provide the power.
The disadvantage to useing iDRAC / iLO, etc al, in our case is that we just don't have enough network ports to do that. Plus iLO & iDRAC are all 1gig connections and all of our switches are 10gig.
10gb network switches should all work at 1gb as well. Now the not enough network ports is at least understandable.
Is it though? Presumably critical infrastructure.. and you can't buy an additional switch to get iLo online?
For the amount of time we spend over there physically sitting in front of the machines, along with the cost of the brand switches (Cisco, if you couldn't guess), cost of the the licensing to get the full iDRAC for "virtual cdrom", cabling it all and all that, it just doesn't make sense -- at least not to me, and not in the face of something like a $200 PiKVM that we could use wirelessly -- or an IP-KVM that needs one network cable per rack or two.
Yeah, this is a double edged sword for sure! If you live relatively close and work on site with the equipment, then savings might be worth it.
I had a conversation with my new boss yesterday about an outage we recently had. He asked the expected question - what could we do to prevent this from happening in the future? (the server crashed - I believe a software issue, but haven't parsed the logs yet, then the system wouldn't boot any more from the USB stick (corrupt boot sector)) He pressed on said - well maybe there wasn't anything that could have been done? I said - well, we could have a fully redundant server with replicated data, etc - but at the cost of $20-30K I didn't feel it was worth the expense, since a 4 hour outage likely doesn't come close to closing us that in revenue (any lost appointments/surgeries are rescheduled in short order.
Additionally - I plugged my plans to move us to a zero trust model, hopefully with zero or near zero local servers will make this a non issue as well.For me spending $300 on iDrac Enterprise is like spending $100 on rails. It's just part of what you need to run servers.
The only reason Dell doesn't include iDrac Enterprise or rails in the price is to make the server look cheaper than actually is. And to have something that inflates the price so they can give a significant discount to their enterprise customers and still make a profit.
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I purchased and used an IP KMV back in like 2008 for the purpose of dealing with user computer issues at a remote site. This was prior to having ScreenConnect. Even back then I used iDRAC Enterprise for servers.
It was cheaper then TeamViewer, and let me actually reinstall the OS remotely. Since I had a Windows 7 USB stick on site also.
Today? ScreenConnect for everything, and I ship new systems. I would never use something like this today.
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Yeah, something like this for server / datacenter access is too much of a gimmick, but I imagine that we can't be the only organisation who's stock of spare / loaner machines has been eaten by the long-term temporary work from home arrangements that we've been dealing with for the past year. Once upon a time we would have been able to swap a device via courier or have the user go to their local office, but between lack of equipment and varying degrees of lockdown across the country we more often than not have to fix what's on-site. There's been talk of a massive equipment refresh for the office staff, meaning new laptops for a whole lot of people, but that hasn't materialized yet...
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This is for home use, for homelab at best. I considered buying one of these few months ago, when I couldn't get ipmi video redirection to work on my home server, because f....ing Java, and I didn't have monitor. That's about the only use case for it.
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Just found a use for a KVM over IP
When remote server(s) aren't responding to on any IP including the iDRAC
as it's happening to me now, since i can't drive i could do with getting on and and doing some reboots. -
@hobbit666 if the host isn't responding to TCP/IP how is this IP based KVM working with the host?
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@DustinB3403 said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@hobbit666 if the host isn't responding to TCP/IP how is this IP based KVM working with the host?
That's just awesome. +100 upvotes!
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@DustinB3403 said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@hobbit666 if the host isn't responding to TCP/IP how is this IP based KVM working with the host?
It doesn't. It connects to video output, and probably usb for mouse and keyboard. Just like any other KVM. IP part is to connect to KVM device, not the host. See this video how it's wired. No network involved.
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@DustinB3403 said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@hobbit666 if the host isn't responding to TCP/IP how is this IP based KVM working with the host?
Over usb and hdmi/vga like any other kvm?
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@Pete-S said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@DustinB3403 said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@hobbit666 if the host isn't responding to TCP/IP how is this IP based KVM working with the host?
That's just awesome. +100 upvotes!
Should of added just the host the rest of the network was working, if i could get onto the console i could run ping tests and see where the failure was.
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@hobbit666 said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@Pete-S said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@DustinB3403 said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@hobbit666 if the host isn't responding to TCP/IP how is this IP based KVM working with the host?
That's just awesome. +100 upvotes!
Should of added just the host the rest of the network was working, if i could get onto the console i could run ping tests and see where the failure was.
Right - if the network is down iDRAC, etc isn't working either.
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@Dashrender said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
Right - if the network is down iDRAC, etc isn't working either.
The Core switch had issues so could ping all the hosts. If i could of got onto the server itself i would of done some pings and found which switch was the issue.
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@hobbit666 said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@Dashrender said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
Right - if the network is down iDRAC, etc isn't working either.
The Core switch had issues so could ping all the hosts. If i could of got onto the server itself i would of done some pings and found which switch was the issue.
I'm lost.
If you can get the host to plug this thing into it and put it on the network, then you could plug in a laptop and ping the network from that.
if you had iDRAC, and it was on the same switching having a problem - no dice.
I suppose that's one argument for putting the iDRACs onto a different switch, but if you're stretching pennies already, I don't see that happening.
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@stacksofplates said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@DustinB3403 said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@hobbit666 if the host isn't responding to TCP/IP how is this IP based KVM working with the host?
Over usb and hdmi/vga like any other kvm?
Hrm, for some reason I was thinking of this more like iDRAC/iLO rather than an actual KVM with dedicated USB connections.
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@DustinB3403 said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@stacksofplates said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@DustinB3403 said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
@hobbit666 if the host isn't responding to TCP/IP how is this IP based KVM working with the host?
Over usb and hdmi/vga like any other kvm?
Hrm, for some reason I was thinking of this more like iDRAC/iLO rather than an actual KVM with dedicated USB connections.
I'm trying to think how that would even work?
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@Dashrender said in Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP:
I'm lost.
If you can get the host to plug this thing into it and put it on the network, then you could plug in a laptop and ping the network from that.
if you had iDRAC, and it was on the same switching having a problem - no dice.
I suppose that's one argument for putting the iDRACs onto a different switch, but if you're stretching pennies already, I don't see that happening.
Because our infrastructure is on a different set of switches 172.20.6.X to the "main" network. 10.0.6.X if i had the KVM on this network i could get onto the console and find out where the issue was. Found out after someone visited the site one of the switches connecting to the host and idrac needed a reboot. Not going into too much detail on how our network is setup, but it's an old building that's had addon after addon
