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