I actually started on call tonight. While it's not an ideal thing to do, it can be managed. Our company gives on call duty to a person once a week. Here are some things that have seemed to help:
* Start on call in the middle of the week.
* We always have a secondary on call person, and we're encouraged to work things out with the secondary person in case we want to go to a movie or something.
* If we get called a lot, we're not expected to be at work the next day, which really helps out.
* One beer (one, not two or three) before sleep helps to take the anxious edge off sometimes.
* Log into the important things you need to be in and keep your computer on overnight. The likelihood of someone breaking into my house and knowing how to do anything useful/detrimental on the VPN is very slim.
* Track every call you get and review them in the on call "hand-off meeting". This seems to help reduce reoccurring issues. Keep a spreadsheet with these calls and append a sheet to it every on call session, and review it.
* The hand-off meeting should involve the previous primary and secondary and the primary and secondary people going on call, as well as someone else who sits in on all meetings to see trends.
* Compensate the person for doing on call for the specific time being on call (ie. not rolled into the the salary by default).
* Let people know if you're going to be in the next day, when you'll be in if you're going to be late, and tell them the reasoning (ie. got called 3 times last night at 2 hour intervals). This seems to help better in team situations.
* Leave work in time for you to be home before the first potential calls.
* Give the on call person one of those 3/4G wifi things in case they are at a place without Internet.

Ideally though we would have someone staffed at work 24/7 who could fix these issues. Maybe one of these days.

This is probably the most fun I've ever had. Since random is usually generated by different intervals 'from' the mouse, it'll keep on running and click on stuff all over the screen.: cat /dev/random > /dev/mouse Also this makes some pretty interesting sounds. Last time I tried it didn't work, but it may with older kernels.: cat /dev/kcore > /dev/dsp I've made the best scripts at work. I aliased a script for ls that'll print out files in the directory spelled out in dots, and it makes a dot-matrix type sound for each one with the beep command. You've got other fun things like wtf, cowsay, cowthink. Or you can watch pr0n at school over SSH with aa-xine. And don't forget the awesome cron job that plays at 1AM every morning for the night shift that blares out LEEEEROOOOOY JEEENKINS! My speakers are usually turned off when I come in the next day. I just want to make sure that no one is falling asleep on the job. :-p

I've worked at a very large data/application hosting company for about a year now, and we run DRACs on almost everything. I'm not too knowledgeable about other solutions, but DRACs do fail. I've had quite a few servers that I have had to go to the device and manually shut it down. Sometimes the cards just don't work, and sometimes they just die. Just like anything else in the computer, a faulty component can take out a good component. I've seen external "remote" KVM switches before, and also remote power switches. You may have better luck if the device is external from the computer itself, but then you're adding potential failure between the two. The bottom line is, cover yourself and have someone nearby just in case, even if they live 15 minutes away. Also a couple other points to make. Old-school doesn't mean terminal-style applications. I'm assuming you're strictly a Windows user and have never had to use something like QAD, SAP, AS/400, linux, or anything else involving mission critical systems. Think outside the mouse. Terminal style applications are great for spitting output to parse and send off through a different interface. Think of all the devices that are text-based and used for communication of some sort. Barcode scanners, pagers, cell phones, other serial based devices. Don't dismiss the possibilities. Also, you're generally not going to find an all-around low bandwidth solution unless you 'are' going strictly terminal based. Most programs out there will allow you to dumb down the picture with compression of all sorts, especially if it is VNC based, and a 'lot' of them are. Turn off color, bump down the resolution, turn off the wallpaper, slow down mouse polling ... it just depends on how patient you are and how pretty you want stuff to look. It's not always going to be like you're sitting in front of the thing, but you can only expect so much when it comes to video compression.