Using serial console as a poor mans IP kvm?
I want to set up a few servers at home. Unfortunately, as I live in
Bulgaria at the moment, the electric power is gone pretty often for
longer periods than my UPS'es can deal with. So my servers will have to
be started at least a few times every quarter.
Another challenge with living in Bulgaria is that there is no law or
order. The Police is just a branch of the Mafia. I need to protect the
data on the servers with full disk encryption in case they are stolen.
That means that I need to reboot the servers relatively often, and
provide the luks passwords every time. Some times I am far away when
this happens. I have been considering Supermicro motherboards with built
in support for remote management - or old KVM IP switches from Ebay. The
problem with Supermicro is that it's expensive and difficult to get the
RAM required for their recent Skylake boards. The problem with Ebay is
that few suppliers ships to Bulgaria, and getting anything trough the
custom's here takes a whole day. Then there is the question if the
device works at all...
So I'm thinking about serial consoles. My gateway router will reboot
after an outage, and it can act as a VPN endpoint. So I can access IP
devices. With a rasberry pi and some relays, I can probably trigger a
cold reboot whenever I need to. If I could log on to the grub console on
the servers over a serial link, that's all I need, really.
Does anyone here have any experience with remote control with Debian
boxes over serial? Will it work reliable?
Thanks in advance.
Jarle
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