[Beowulf] Re: recommendation on crash cart for a cluster room:fullcluster KVM is not an option I suppose?

[Rahul Nabar]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 4:23 PM, Buccaneer for Hire.
<buccaneer at rocketmail.com> wrote:
>
> -
>> > Anyway, for me it is a lot easier to snake the one
>> long cable across the
>> > floor than it would be to roll a cart around. YMMV.
>>
>> Yup; true. I totally agree.
>
> We use serial port concentrators which we use to handle most of our problems. If I have to get up close and personal, we have a bunch of carts we just roll over and plug in.

In past experience the only time I need non-ssh access is for initial
BIOS setup and MAC address extraction. Nowadays, the vendors will ship
with the BIOS settings I ask for and also provide the MAC address
externally (or I can autoextract from the initial PXE discovery
packets).

After that its PXE etc. and once I have a shell window everything is
OK. In the rare cases that I can't come to the point of a shell even
terminal access (via IMPI etc.) rarely helps  since at that point a
motherboard swap or a dead HDD etc. is involved.

So, hopefully I will have very little need for IPMI (remote power
cycling is great though; those network aware power distribution stics
seem great).

-- 
Rahul