On Thu, Sep 08, 2016 at 10:26:59PM +0300, Jarle Aase wrote: > 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?
We use serial consoles on Debian and Oracle Linux boxes all the time, and have done so for more than a decade. They are more dependable than anything else -- once you have set them up and tested them through a full reboot cycle. There are relatively expensive, but compact, devices that will do both serial access and power switching. 8 of each is a common configuration, as is 16. We like WTI boxes. I am somewhat suspicious of USB-to-serial adapters in general, but they are cheap and you can hook up lots at once through a USB hub. You will probably want to test several brands in order to find something reliable. Incidentally, there are very few applications in which a Skylake processor will be notably faster than the previous generation of Broadwells -- and Broadwells can use DDR3. You might save a lot of money and get built-in KVMs that way. -dsr-
