[Beowulf] Any recommendations for a small (~4 port) KVM-over-IP switch

[Rahul Nabar]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 3:02 PM, Andrew Latham <lathama at gmail.com> wrote:
> I keep a Lantronix Spider in my laptop bag.  I paid $550 USD when they
> were new.  I would say that at ~$270 @ Provantage that they are great
> deals.  They are also zero units (They come with a mounting kit that
> can attach to most any cable management arm or rack rail).
>
> The Spider is not the solution for everything but when you need just
> one more node it is an option.
>
> I was reminded by a peer to mention that the Spider can authenticate
> against Radius, LDAP, and Microsoft Active Directory etc...

Thanks Andrew for the additional tips! Yup, I'm impressed with it too
and might buy one for my laptop bag. Especially the fact that it
totally does away with the intermediate KVM-switch that's in most
other alternatives is pretty nice.

I'm curious, can this actually replace, say a crash cart? Could one
have one of these handy and then whenever a compute-node goes bust in
a faraway hot-aisle, just plug the Lantronix into a spare eth port and
then go back and play with the node from a central console? [I guess
the issue is does it have to be preplugged or can it be plugged into
the monitor port AFTER a crash]

Or will there be situations where a crash cart is still needed?

-- 
Rahul