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

[Josh England]

Dan,

Set up remote power with some RPC hardware (eg: baytech) of some kind
and invest in some Terminal servers (eg: cyclades/avicent).  With those,
you can boot/reboot/diagnose almost any kind of problem (even kernel
panics).  If you set up your machines to boot off the network, then its
even better.

-JE

On Mon, 2007-05-14 at 15:42 -0300, Daniel van Ham Colchete wrote:
> Hello yall,
>
> first, this is a kind of "half-topic" issue, but I'll be using Gentoo
> and the matter is on the interest of this list.
>
> I'll be building a Gentoo Cluster soon in a datacenter 6000 miles
> (9600 km) away from me... This project has to be as cost efficient as
> possible. A lot of research was made in this heading: the best cost
> effective solution.
>
> Everything I'll be redundant and scalable. Somethings have three
> levels of fail safeness (like my storage). So everything can fail.
> Every single item on the cluster can fail and my service will still be
> online.
>
> Right now I'm concerned with how I'm going to fix software problems
> when they arrive. I'm thinking about a situation where I have a kernel
> panic or when the Linux won't boot for any reason (incorrect kernel
> upgrade, hard drive failure, etc...).
>
> To solve this, I'm seeing 2 options right now. The first would be
> buying a KVM-over-IP unit. But, a KVM-over-IP unit with the number of
> ports I need is expensive, almost as expensive as the servers it will
> be connected.
>
> The second option would be having another server acting as a USB
> Guest. This usb-guest-server would be connected to every other server
> through a USB cable and would be seen as a pen drive with a Gentoo
> rescue disk inside. Them, if something goes wrong, I can activate the
> virtual pen drive, remotely reboot the troubled server and it will
> boot the pen drive. There is a howto about this at
> http://www.linux-usb.org/gadget/file_storage.html. But I can't find
> the necessary hardware to do this. Has anyone been able to do anything
> like this?
>
> 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.
>
> Thank you all.
>
> Best regards,
> Daniel Colchete


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