KVM Switches

[geoff]

To those people recommending various screenscrapers such as VNC or remote shells like Putty, they are fine as far as they go. In my experience they don't go far enough. How, for instance, do you use VNC to set BIOS configurations or investigate why a machine hasn't booted to a GUI?

Set up just one machine with a video card and a x-windows server, then other machines can use the server gui without needing their own video card. A simple way is just to run programs on the remote machines using 'xon'.

Make sure you have set the bios correctly before you remove the video card. :-)

[Xyzzy]

Originally posted by Angular
How would you setup the BIOS to allow this? What motherboards allow this?

Some motherboards allow this... The motherboard in our Opteron server, for example...

That said, it is not a common option...

I'm a little old fashioned I guess, because this is one of the features I look for, and I'm used to all of my older computers allowing serial console access...

But I do keep an old monitor and keyboard around for this purpose, just in case...

BTW, you can get a card that allows KVM/BIOS access over TCP/IP... It is very expensive but very cool...

http://www.minicom.com/kvm_mxip.htm