@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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