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Re: Using serial console as a poor mans IP kvm?

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On 9/8/16 3:26 PM, Jarle Aase wrote:

> I want to set up a few servers at home. Unfortunately, as I live in 
> Bulgaria at the moment, the electric power is gone pretty often for 
> longer periods than my UPS'es can deal with. So my servers will have 
> to be started at least a few times every quarter.
>
> Another challenge with living in Bulgaria is that there is no law or 
> order. The Police is just a branch of the Mafia. I need to protect the 
> data on the servers with full disk encryption in case they are stolen.
>
> That means that I need to reboot the servers relatively often, and 
> provide the luks passwords every time. Some times I am far away when 
> this happens. I have been considering Supermicro motherboards with 
> built in support for remote management - or old KVM IP switches from 
> Ebay. The problem with Supermicro is that it's expensive and difficult 
> to get the RAM required for their recent Skylake boards. The problem 
> with Ebay is that few suppliers ships to Bulgaria, and getting 
> anything trough the custom's here takes a whole day. Then there is the 
> question if the device works at all...
>
> So I'm thinking about serial consoles. My gateway router will reboot 
> after an outage, and it can act as a VPN endpoint. So I can access IP 
> devices. With a rasberry pi and some relays, I can probably trigger a 
> cold reboot whenever I need to. If I could log on to the grub console 
> on the servers over a serial link, that's all I need, really.
>
> Does anyone here have any experience with remote control with Debian 
> boxes over serial? Will it work reliable?
>

It sort of works.

I've done this two ways:

1.  External serial-to-ethernet box.  The external box turns out to be 
somewhat flakey, and a security hole (unpatched embedded linux with some 
vulnerabilities, and it needs to be rekeyed annually, but that doesn't 
actually work very smoothly).

2. Supermicro IPMI board:  Sometimes works, sometimes simply doesn't 
respond - usually when one needs it most.

In both cases, unless you layer a VPN on top of them, they are really 
nasty security holes.  I've ended up resorting to the old "call the data 
center and have a human push the button" - but that doesn't sound like 
it applies to your situation.

Good luck finding a solution.

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

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Using serial console as a poor mans IP kvm? Jarle Aase <jgaa@jgaa.com> - 2016-09-08 21:40 +0200
  Re: Using serial console as a poor mans IP kvm? Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2016-09-08 22:00 +0200
    Re: Using serial console as a poor mans IP kvm? Glenn English <ghe@slsware.net> - 2016-09-08 23:50 +0200
      Re: Using serial console as a poor mans IP kvm? "Neal P. Murphy" <neal.p.murphy@alum.wpi.edu> - 2016-09-09 00:00 +0200
  Re: Using serial console as a poor mans IP kvm? Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> - 2016-09-08 22:30 +0200
  Re: Using serial console as a poor mans IP kvm? "Neal P. Murphy" <neal.p.murphy@alum.wpi.edu> - 2016-09-08 22:40 +0200
  Re: Using serial console as a poor mans IP kvm? Don Armstrong <don@debian.org> - 2016-09-09 00:40 +0200
  Re: Using serial console as a poor mans IP kvm? Lars Noodén <lars.nooden@gmail.com> - 2016-09-09 07:50 +0200
    Re: Using serial console as a poor mans IP kvm? Tixy <tixy@yxit.co.uk> - 2016-09-09 09:20 +0200
      Re: Using serial console as a poor mans IP kvm? Eike Lantzsch <zp6cge@gmx.net> - 2016-09-09 14:50 +0200
  Re: Using serial console as a poor mans IP kvm? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2016-09-09 09:40 +0200
    Re: Using serial console as a poor mans IP kvm? Jarle Aase <jgaa@jgaa.com> - 2016-09-09 20:10 +0200
      Re: Using serial console as a poor mans IP kvm? tomas@tuxteam.de - 2016-09-09 20:50 +0200

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