Re: [gentoo-cluster] Remote administration of a server

[Alex Howells]

> Thinking about other options, does anyone have any other tip for me? Am I
> going in the right direction? For the obvious answer: I know it's better to
> be closer to the datacenter, but that's not an option for me right now and I
> know I'll have a remote-hands service, but it can be very time inefficient
> sometimes and I'm trying to avoid it as much as possible.

Tips:

  *  Install decent PDUs in your racks, I'd highly recommend APC
Masterswitch; you're going to want to power cycle various bits of
hardware, and SNMP is an easy way to do it.

  *  Some cheap kit (Cisco 2506s) from a distributor or eBay with 4 x
8-port console cards (32 total) can give you inexpensive access to the
serial line of your nodes, buy a slightly more expensive one for if
you wanna deploy 8 x 8-port or 12 x 8-port.

  *  Have some kind of rescue environment available over network boot,
it's invaluable for diagnosing H/W problems; you'll probably also want
memtest86+ or equivalent too.

  *  Invest in some IP cameras for the suite within the datacenter.
Technicians are often rubbish and don't describe things clearly, it's
a very good idea to be able to say, "Show me!" and also for security
purposes!

  *  Write a small database which knows where every node is located
(physical location) and what it's connected to (switch port, PDU port,
console server port); then a bit of software to wrap around that and
you'll have a good level of control over all nodes.

All of the above avoids complications with KVM-over-IP type devices,
most of which come with evil Java applets :(  If you go down the Cisco
route, you'll be able to telnet to the 'console server' and access any
of its serial lines, make sure to define ACLs.

Cheers,
Alex
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