Built a nice little PiKVM and deployed it in my NAS. The NAS is heavy and placed in a dark half-height place under the stairs so it’s awkward when things go wrong and you need hardware access.
Not aware of any such project. I’d assume you’ll need some hardware anyways as you need it for the level of access (ATX etc.). Not sure how that would be preferable to this.
I was thinking more about the basics, like USB input and getting the image+sound. For that you could get away with a special USB cable and a capture card. I’m just not aware of any software for it, I don’t think the original PiKVM stuff was ever ported to PC.
There is power/reset and power/hdd LEDs as well as a USB 3 header for mouse and keyboard and flash/disc emulation. That way you can mount an image and boot from that if you want. Super handy for re-installs or troubleshooting tools.
Would’ve loved to gotten one of those. But the power consumption of a Xeon is a bit higher than I’d like. This was a nice to have, not need to. It was a Christmas gift from my wife 🥰
I’m using a workstation board in my server. Asus Pro WS W680M-ACE SE along with a Core i5-13500. Intel support ECC for consumer CPUs but only when using workstation motherboards :/. The IPMI on this board works well though.
Don’t have some Intel CPUs Intel vPro making you also able to control the PC in a LVM manner?
I havent tried it yet but my (so far) research suggests its possible and it would be a useful feature for those repurposing old workstation pcs as servers.
I think some other CPU/MBs also have this feature.
But I would giess they are only implemented in business scopes like the Pro/EliteDesk line from HP and the other SIs equivalent.
So it’s a computer that lets you remotely control another computer? Is the advantage over SSH or remote desktop etc that you can interact with stuff outside the OS, like in BIOS?
That’s basically it. It guarantees you can always access your computer remotely, even if you broke your ssh, or accidentally messed up your network config, or can’t boot due to filesystem corruption and need to run fsck from recovery mode.
Exactly, it isn’t a replacement. It is redundancy in the form of a screen with keyboard and mouse directly connected, but accessibly from remote (my couch). It is far from my primary interface with the server.
Yes. This is home-made out-of-band management, like HP’s iLO, Dell’s iDRAC, or generic IPMI. Not only is it a virtual KVM (keyboard/video/mouse), you can pass the host’s power button through this device so you can remotely power on or reset a hung or powered-off system, or mount and boot from a virtual floppy or ISO to completely reinstall the remote system.
It’s a KVM in the same sense but instead of switching it provides the functionality over a web interface so that I can manage my server from my workstation or laptop instead of crawling in the space beneath the stairs where my server is if something goes wrong. Compare with IPMI.
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