Remote admin products

[Alex_133]

I'm looking for a remote admin hardware which provides features like power-on,power-off, console access. I've been using HP's TopTools, Secure Web Console and Remote Insight, but I doubt these hardware is tied to particular series of the vendor's server family.

Is there a "universal" remote admin hardware which works on x86 PC? I need that to admin some
Linux boxeslocated in remote area, which I sometime need to access the console right after it was boot up. (u know, do things like select different kernel to boot from Lilo/GRUB, changing BIOS CMOS settings, etc).

[Goran Koruga · Accepted solution]

Hi.

You have products that allow you to do that, they can transmit the VGA screen and all the rest to the remote box using TCP/IP, but they cost a lot.

It would be much easier if your hardware can be operated entirely via console, this is not a problem for GRUB/kernel, but not many machines have a BIOS that can be accessed this way.

But if you have it, I recommend you to check this stuff :

http://www.jfc.org.uk/software/conc.html

It worked fine for us when we were testing it on LAN. Of course you could as well use minicom or something similar.

G.

[Sergejs Svitnevs]

Digi terminal server delivers standart serial-to-Ethernet connectivity.

check out the following link :
www.digi.com

Regards,
Sergejs

[Alex_133]

thanks for the reply, but the above 2 doesn't seem to fit into my situation, my main purpose is to able to monitor the boot process(from POST into Kernel Loading) remotely, so that I have an idea on the messages on the console, I can know why the machine doesn't boot with the new kernel i have just compile, panic messages, etc.

Or even system messages like "cannot find boot partition", "keyboard is not detected", etc...

[Stuart Browne]

Lets see..

You can get remote/ip based KVM's now-days, you could possibly use one of them.

Also, depending on the type of server, you might have some built-in remote manageability (the HP NetServer L servers all had this).

Failing that, you could always tell the kernel that you have a serial console, and pump everything to an attached modem or something.

All possabilities..

[Alex_133]

Yes! remote/ip based KVM is exactly the keyword I'm looking for, I found a couple, here is one(http://www.kvmpartnership.co.uk/eric.htm) that match perfectly of my requirement, thank you guys!!