Kyrre Ness Sjobak wrote:
tir, 16.11.2004 kl. 18.48 skrev Kim Lux:
>Lets say I've got a rack of headless servers. They do have a video
>card, but no monitor. Lets say that one of them is giving trouble -
>won't boot, no network, etc. The way it is right now, I have to cart a
>monitor over to the machine in question and hook it and a mouse and
>keyboard up before I can work on it.
>
>Is there a way in Linux to use a USB or firewire equipped laptop as the
>monitor/keyboard/mouse for the servers on the rack ? Could one have a
>USB port on the front of each server and direct some sort of video
>output from it to the laptop and use the laptop display/keyboard/mouse
>as the input to the server ?
>
>I know about X11 and X11 forwarding and that works fine for a lot of
>things, but it doesn't work for watching the machine during the boot
>process and it won't work on a machine that has a network issue.
>
>What I am asking for, I guess, is a virtual (software) video card
>(device) in the server that takes the X11 display commands that would
>have been sent to the video card and redirects them, via the USB cable
>to my laptop display. The laptop would have to be running some sort of
>USB device software as well.
>
>Even better would be to be able to use the hard drive/cdrom drive of the
>laptop as if they were part of the server as well.
>
>I know it would be difficult to see all of the boot process, but if the
>virtual display driver got loaded early on, you could at least see the
>rest of the boot process.
>
>Does anyone know of something like this ? I've looked and I can't find
>anything.
>
>Thanks
>
>--
>Kim Lux (Mr.) Diesel Research Inc
>
>
I think you should rather be looking for one of those LAN-based admin
pci cards...
actually, what i use in my rack is a rack mount kb/monitor which folds
falt when not in use and slides into the rack and a 10 port rack mount
kvm, got my kb/monitor on ebay for 150.00 and the kvm is about 100,
cheaper than a laptop, and bult into the rack.
Jim