Ask Slashdot: Hardware for Headless Linux Boxes

Alan Hodgkinson asks: "I would like to setup a bunch of Linux boxes without keyboards and monitors. The systems must be accessable/controlable via their serial ports, including the ability to send them a hard reset. Sun Sparc hardware has this feature. You can remove the keyboard and the system will boot and send all its console output through the serial port. You can even reset the machine by sending a break to the serial port. Is there any hardware available for PCs that will provides this functionality? (And that works on a wide variety of PC hardware). ISPs must face this problem. What do they do? Tips anyone?"

Re:was that an ADB port? -- definitive answer.

Ok, so we're the poor bastards who came up with this and are building it. As some of you were able to figure out, that's a PS/2 keyboard port on the back of the board meant to jumper to the PC keyboard port..

So what started as a couple of guys needing a decent way to manage cheap fast hardware in their webservers, seems to have turned into a small tornado of interest... I don't know who told who and how it got to slashdot. We were hoping to keep a lid on this until it was finished....

Present status is that it's basically functional but has some rough edges and needs some 'usability' help... The coding and design has been taking a back seat to 'real work' because there are bills to pay... This is sadly still the case so try not to lean on us too hard please..

Herb.

http://www.realweasel.com/ A dumb name for a dumb answer to a really dumb question.

PCWeasel 2000

Sounds like you want one of these [realweasel.com]. They're not on the market yet, though, but they look super-cool.

What you need.

I think some people might be getting a touch confused here, so I'll try and restate the need.

Basically with a Sun machine, you can attach a console to the back and watch the boot process, right from the point where the PROM detects no keyboard present and redirects the console to the serial line. It doesn't matter whether or not you have a video card present for the machine to boot.

On a PC, depending on the BIOS you can or can't get away without a keyboard being present. However none (with the exception of the one I'm going to mention) will let you boot without a video card present. If the card is there then that is what will be your console.

Now people were talking about using the SERIAL CONSOLE directive, or just running getty on the serial line, to redirect it and thats fine, provided the machine boots that far. With a Sun, if it fails to boot because of a problem with the hardware, or misconfiguration in the PROM (BIOS equivalent) you still have console access. On a PC you don't.

Now Phoenix have just brought out a new BIOS which will let you redirect the console to a serial line in the same way as a Sun does, i.e. you can get to the BIOS from the serial line, edit parameters and force a powercycle. This is an immensely cool idea. In the ISP I worked in (one of the largest in Europe) we used vast amounts of PC based UNIX machines (OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD) none of which we could do this with.

Check out http://www.phoenix.com/platform/ser verbios.html [phoenix.com] and scroll down to the bit about Serial Remote Console.

HTH HAND

Joe
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