Comments on: Poor Man’s IP-KVM (kind of)

By: John Goodwin

John Goodwin — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 23:45:53 +0000

I am writing a review on an IP KVM which retails for $549, and I've seen it street price around $380 or so. freeView IP 100 KVM This article should be completed over the next few days.

By: Viktor Petersson

Viktor Petersson — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 14:48:00 +0000

Good point. It’s true that if you’re careful when selecting servers, you can probably find ones with serial console.

In my case however, the servers did not have this support.

Also, good point about the Portmaster. The seem to be very cheap and quite decent. But sure, only telnet is sure a big drawback that lowers your security.

By: L.A. Price

L.A. Price — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:07:00 +0000

Reasonably careful selection of servers will get you built-in BIOS level control via the serial console. Dell Poweredge series offer this by default, as do most of the other server manufacturers; outfits that stuff PC m/b into rackmount cases don’t.

Ask yourself if remote BIOS level control is worth it for your situation. If the server is going to be located hundreds of miles away, then spend the bucks to make it happen, but if it’s just down the hall?

The Cyclades family of terminal servers is fairly competent and economical (n < $100 per port) and will cover the basics.

If you really want to go ghetto you can get an old Portmaster and stick it on your internal network (PM’s don’t support ssh so you’re stuck with telnet) depending on what you can get your hands you might be able to make that work for less than $10 bucks per port.