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 <a href="leitlhttp://leitl.org">leitl</a> 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 F6BE