Groups | Search | Server Info | Keyboard shortcuts | Login | Register [http] [https] [nntp] [nntps]

Groups > linux.debian.user > #171914

Using serial console as a poor mans IP kvm?

Show all headers | View raw

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?

Thanks in advance.

Jarle

Back to linux.debian.user | Previous | Next — Next in thread | Find similar | Unroll thread

Thread

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

csiph-web