Brian A. Seklecki wrote: > On Wed, 2008-08-06 at 13:58 -0700, Chris Cappuccio wrote: >> spend your money on a motherboard with serial console. like a supermicro >> board or something. you'll be happier. > > No offense but: No. No you wont. Unless you have IPMI or something > like Dell's DRAC (4, not 5 -- 5 sux big time).
Normal serial console works great for me. There are some quirks, I've encountered a few on Dell systems, HP seems quite a bit better. Most of my boxes are Linux, and the Dell bios with "redirect after POST" conflicts with the serial console settings in the boot loader, so as part of the automated system installation it detects what model# the installer is running on, and if it's an affected system the installer disables the serial console settings on the boot loader to work around the BIOS bug(but keeps the serial console enabled elsewhere like remote tty). Haven't had a chance to mess with DRAC v4 yet, but DRAC v5 works alright, though I have to reboot it more often than I had to reboot the HP iLO (or HP iLO 2). The supermicro premium management card is pretty nice too though last I checked you had to have a browser to get to the console, no SSH access. Earlier versions had an SSH daemon, but none of the commands worked once I got logged in. A few years ago when I had a lot more supermicro systems I got them to fix some of their bios bugs that were the same as the Dell - they conflicted with the boot loader. I'm told by my co workers that Dell support is pretty worthless so I just work around it on my end instead. I also make sure to disable all frame buffers, which is pretty easy. I do like how the newer HP systems auto detect what console port your on, even our latest Dell boxes we seem to have to go into the bios and enable serial redirection before we can get remote serial access via DRAC 5. I don't use the KVM stuff as it wants java, and a web browser etc unless I absolutely have to. 99.9% of the stuff I need the console for plain text serial is fine (and faster/easier to get to over SSH). My OpenBSD systems are installed by hand, fortunately the installer is good about asking about serial consoles during installation, makes it pretty easy too. For what looks like about $300, this mini terminal server can probably provide good remote access to a system with a serial port(assuming you only need 1, if you need lots of ports get a bigger model): http://www.avocent.com/CycladesTS100.aspx I haven't used that model myself, but have used tons of ACS-32 and ACS-48s. (before Cyclades was bought by Avocent, I hear since they have started to charge extra for a lot of the things that were free before). nate
