DRAC and VNC?

[Adam Nielsen]

Hi Patrick,

> THE "BMC" Baseboard Management Controller provides also a feature for
> console redirection. It worked with a SOL Proxy and only text based.
> Each Dell Server has an BMC on board.

Good suggestion - I have tried this on our current server but 
unfortunately it doesn't work so well.  When you restart it tends to 
drop out, and it's a real pain trying to get SOL Proxy installed on a 
generic Linux distro.

It also drops out once Linux boots, unless you tell Linux to redirect to 
a serial console.  Of course once you do that you can no longer use the 
local console, which is a problem too if you ever need to do work at the 
machine itself (e.g. test a hardware replacement.)

I also found that if you connect after the machine has booted it doesn't 
always come up.  In short - it was a great idea but the implementation 
is still a very buggy.  (I'm sure it would've been much nicer if it was 
a plain SSH and no SOL Proxy was required!)

Cheers,
Adam.