[CentOS] KVM Remote

Thu Sep 18 22:11:24 UTC 2014
Keith Keller <kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us>

On 2014-09-18, Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 18 Sep 2014, John R Pierce wrote:
>
>> On 9/18/2014 12:59 PM, Matt wrote:
>>>  Have a few Supermicro based CentOS boxes at remote date center.
>>>  Is there anyway to do a remote KVM over TCP to them for the case
>>>  when they do not seem to come back after a reboot?
>>
>> the ones I've used have a full IPMI/KVM on a seperate ethernet=20
>> management port.  I believe this is an optional feature, some=20
>> motherboards/systems have it, some don't.  I would NOT plug this=20
>> into the public internet, rather, I would have a seperate management=20
>> LAN whihc you need to access via a VPN or ssh tunnel or something.
>
> +1
>
> I've never used the remote KVM, but I use serial-over-LAN for console=20
> support on all our newer servers.

I've used both remote KVM and SOL, and both work very well.  Your board
must have an active BMC for this to work; as John mentioned, it's not a
default feature (though it's becoming more so on ''server-class''
boards.)

The remote KVM is a Java Web Start applet.  I've had some issues getting
it to work, especially on an OS X client.  A CentOS client is usually
okay but sometimes flaky.  Serial-over-LAN is more convenient to access
but less well documented (which says something, since Supermicro's docs
on their IPMI implementation are generally quite poor).

And +2billion on securing the subnets used to access to the IPMI consoles.

--keith


-- 
kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us