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by ryanmcbride 9 days ago
It will never make sense to me why KVMs are such a hard problem to solve. It seems like something we should have a good answer for by now but we still really just don't without dropping hundreds of dollars, and even then it still feels like a crap shoot.
4 comments
wang_li 9 days ago
They aren't a hard problem to solve. In the server market it's completely solved with a BMC. The problem being solved here is someone wants to make a product using some commodity product like a raspberry pi, perform video capture on a VGA/HMDI/DP port. This is not actually a problem end users have.

If you want to plug into a system that isn't server class, then they should be producing a video card that hooks into the USB bus, the always on rail of the power supply, the power switch pin of the power supply, and has an RJ45 jack. The contents of the card should be an off the shelf BMC chip.

But realistically if you want this kind of functionality, just buy server class systems that come with it.

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blipvert 9 days ago
It’s bizarre that one needs to do all this via a keyboard/monitor interface.

Nearly thirty years ago when I used to work on Silicon Graphics kit everything from powering on and off a server to installing the OS from scratch over the network could be done out of band via serial - and automatically, using expect(1)

That’s progress, I guess.

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themafia 9 days ago
We used to do this. Since we had so many to manage we actually got an IP based serial port multiplexer.

https://www.digi.com/products/networking/infrastructure-mana...

The downside is you now had to ask of any Cat5 cable "is this serial or is this ethernet?"

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toast0 9 days ago
server ipmi includes serial over lan, which can work ... it's helpful if the console settings for early boot match the console settings for OS boot, and there's no standard for sharing them, so that's a bit of a mess... and then you have some where serial over lan drops out during boot, which is kind of terrible. :(

But, the devices here are geared towards people using consumer products as servers (which I do at home, not critizing), and serial console during early boot is not an option on those, and most boards don't even have a serial port anymore.

I will say, if you're presenting a usb keyboard, you might also be able to present usb storage which could be nice for booting off of.

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fc417fc802 9 days ago
> serial console during early boot is not an option on those

But it should be. There's really no excuse for the current state of affairs. There ought to be a standardized low level API for all this stuff. One should never need to directly attach a keyboard, mouse, and monitor in order to provision a piece of hardware.

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mrsilencedogood 9 days ago
As other comments have indicated, this is basically solved for all servers. All Poweredges and supermicros have come with increasingly sophisticated integrated remote management systems for the past 20+ years. I have some R610s and their drac is old but still quite good all things considered.
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yencabulator 7 days ago
In an alternate timeline, we would have gotten IP-only servers:

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix06/tech/ben-yehud...

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