Re: Rack mounted backend ideas
On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 04:46:14PM -0500, Mark L. Kahnt wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-01-13 at 14:48, Carel Fellinger wrote:
...
> > Here me English is lacking, atleast I can't parse the above.
...
> Yeah, I did say something weird there :)
>
...sniped the explanation
Okee, I see. In my experience most linux related things go swell with
a headless box. Bootup selections are easily handled over the serial
line, (root) login over the serial line is almost like the console but
for the fact that I haven't managed yet to get minitel to deal with
colors nor to pass on Home, Page-up, Ctrl-Alt-Del, etc keys. Not that
big of a problem for me, as I very often log in onto such system with
ssh over the ethernet from a normal console or from an xterm.
The one thing that's really troublesome is things the BIOS tries to
tell, like the other day I had a harddisk start to fail, and the BIOS
tolled me so thanks to S.M.A.R.T. But on a headless system such
messages would have been invisible, and depending on your BIOS you
have a change that the BIOS will keep waiting for you to press a
key:(, preventing it to complete the booting. There is some S.M.A.R.T.
aware software under linux, but I haven't tried it out yet.
So yes it works. Have it hooked up onto your local network to easily
access the servers using ssh (and X-forwarding), use a serial line for
boot control and root access, enable S.M.A.R.T. under linux, and prey
the linux S.M.A.R.T. software detects harddisk failures before the
BIOS does.
--
groetjes, carel
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