How to delete a non existant file?

[Robert Brockway]

On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, Lennart Sorensen wrote:

> 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.

The problem is the colo will likely still charge it as a seperate box. 
They normally charge for a subset of power, space, network and/or IPs - 
and it won't be the subset which is convenient to us :)  If it needs a 
network port and a power point it'll likely get charged as another box, 
which is fair enough as it is consuming their resources.

> 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

Amazingly few people have taken this approach even when it makes sense.  I 
have tried to convince quite a few companies...

> 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).

That's what I meant by cross-connect.  I've never known 2 consoles plugged 
together to work.

BTW when I have run serial console servers I run only ssh on the box and 
lock ssh down to pki auth only.

So the Knoppix cdrom becomes a viable alternative to a serial console in a 
variety of situations.

I recently rebuilt a box in Florida in a colo using this approach.  It had 
a twin in Toronto which I rebuilt from RH to Ubuntu at the console.  I 
then imaged the filesystems (xfsdump) here, booted the box in Florida to 
Knoppix, repartitioned the drives and dumped the images directly on to the 
box.  Then I reran the boot loader and voila - working Ubuntu box in 
Florida.

Cheers,

Rob

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