ollie lho ollie@sis.com.tw writes:
On Tue, 2002-09-17 at 07:38, Eric W Biederman wrote:
You can do serial from power on. Over the network is a more interesting problem, and hasn't been fully solved yet. Currently I connect the serial port to a box with a lot of serial ports, and that box is network accessible.
Eric, Do you know if there is an KVM switch equivalent for serial port ??
Yes. Usually I believe they are called serial concentrators. We have a device here designed to be used with clusters called the icebox. It combines the serial concentrator function, and the power management functionality, into one device.
How do you monitor multiple LinuxBIOS boxes except using many minicom ??
I open multiple telnet connections to the icebox.
Maybe some of these things are only really annoying when the don't exist and you have lots of hardware. For me I like the ability to do a full install including flashing the BIOS on 350 nodes in under 10 minutes.
How do you connect these 350 nodes "physically" to you console ?? Do you need many consoles or is there any think like "hub" the LAN ??
A network accessible device that is accept serial cables like a hub on the LAN. And it plugs into the LAN.
It is really convinient when you are debugging those BIOS problems that only affect a small percent of your nodes. I can sit at my desk and work on machines that are miles away, or I can write a script that will cold boot the machine all night long to test booting.
Eric