JetKVM - a polished take at the nanoKVM(?)
JetKVM - a polished take at the nanoKVM(?)
These small little handy-dandy devices seem to get more and more popular. Anyone here chipped in for a JetKVM yet? Looks and sounds pretty solid. Are there a lot of you that have aquired a nanoKVM?
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How often are you people screwing things up so badly that your servers aren’t reachable over the network and require keyboard/monitor access? This is basically only ever once for me for the initial OS install, and even then that can be automated away if I had to do it more than once every couple years
Don't have to screw anything up. I have a machine that has a weird stability issue that I haven't tracked down - it seems to take out the PCIe bus, so the errors don't get logged to disk or network - without my KVM I'd have to leave a monitor connected just for this edge case and be home to check on it
Power issues can cause problems that the hardware glitches into states it should not be. Changing something in the BIOS or updating it. Hardware defects. OS upgrade fails (Kernel bug causes the network driver to fail) Etc. Etc.
Those devices are not for the weekly "oh my setup failed" its for the once in 10 years "i am on vacation and the server is not reachable and for some reasons my system crashed and has not rebooted by its own"
And for below 100€ it's a no-brainer.
If you work in dev/test/qa labs, there are a million reasons you'd need access to the BMC/KVM. It would be foolish to attempt things like firmware updates or testing the install of an upcoming release without it. Most modern BMC solutions also have a central management application that allows you to push firmware updates to all your hosts at once. And if you need to change properties like UEFI trusted certs, change boot from San parameters on the hba, or boot in legacy mode, you generally need "physical" access, at least the first time.
A decent KVM on an oob network can also remove the need to add jumphosts as an entry point to private testbeds. My job would be 10x as difficult without them.
This sort of device doesn't have that level of feature set, but even so, it could be very useful where I work, especially as it can power cycle systems or automate button presses with add-ons.
For that one time when systemd-logind crashed on every boot on an unmodified CentOS install because of an OOM.