serial over lan

[Donald Becker]

On Sat, 22 Feb 2003, Dale Harris wrote:

> So maybe I better short term solution would just be to go with terminal
> servers or serial concentrators.  I guess that is what I'm hearing.  I'd
> rather stick to a more open, less proprietary, solution for my cluster.

[[ I hope you mean to imply that serial concentrators are the proprietary
solution. ]]

Today you shouldn't rely on an IPMI 1.5 implementation picked at random
to perform reliable serial-over-LAN.  Going further, I would advise
against using any IPMI network commands while the host OS is running.
Instead you should communicate with the host OS, and use it to performan
the IPMI commands using the KCS or MCS interface.

If the host OS isn't running, then using standard IPMI features is
reliable (*).  Serial-over-LAN has a good chance of work well enough for
BIOS setup and observing the boot failure.

If the host OS should be running but is not responding to network
traffic, then it's safe to reset the machine or shut down the power
using IPMI.  (You don't care if you lose timer ticks or drop packets.)

(*) "Reliable" here means "will work in real life" as opposed to
"reliable, confirmed transaction".

-- 
Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Scyld Beowulf cluster system
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993