How to delete a non existant file?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2007 at 05:07:43PM -0400, Robert Brockway wrote:
> When possible I have indeed done this.  It is very cool to take a box off 
> the network when it is 15000km away, reconfigure it's networking and bring 
> it backup all from a serial console.
> 
> Often the client only has a single box in the colo so a serial console 
> isn't an option (a 2nd box is too difficult to justify).

You can get little 3 x 4 x 1" boxes that have a serial port and an
ethernet.  Of course you still want to be sure they do ssh or other
secure communications.  Still that is small enough you could probably
stick it onto the back of your existing box without taking up extra rack
space.  Those are about $350.

> If 2 servers are available you can cross-connect the consoles bearing in 
> mind that this puts them in the same security domain (each system is 
> essentially defenceless to an attack from the other).
> 
> When you have multiple servers a serial console server starts to make 
> sense.

Well you can easily get 8 port secure console servers that fit in 1U for
$700, which compared to what I understand datacenter rack cost for the
servers to be, is essentially nothing (other than the 1U extra space you
need).  But yes of course if you have two servers you can cross connect
them (although preferably each should have two serial ports since having
two consoles talk to each other is not usually a good idea).

Of course you do need an IP address for the serial server in either
case, although you don't need to pay for lots of bandwidth.  Not sure
how much of a rip off each IP address is.

--
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists