Dell PowerEdge Virtual Media

[Stuart Barkley]

On Tue, 8 Dec 2009 at 20:07 -0000, Miroslav Lachman wrote:

> Virtual Media / Virtual Console from all vendors is paint in the
> a...
>
> I have iLO card in HP ML110 G5 and Virtual Media doesn't work at
> all. Virtual device is not detected by FreeBSD nor in BIOS, so I
> can't even boot from it.
>
> Virtual Media (console) on Sun Fire X2100 M2 is accessible only by
> IP address, not by its domain name (I reported it to Sun
> Microsystems 11 month ago and Sun leaves it unfixed.
>
> In Virtual Console of Supermicro, there is problem with keyboard
> input in sysinstall prior to FreeBSD 8.x
>
> So I am disapointed by this hyped feature ;(

Does anyone here find this stuff useful?

We have a vendor pushing "Virtual Media" on us and I don't see the
point at all.  I also don't see the point of the screen scraping and
graphics virtual display support.

I've just started playing with IPMI capable motherboard and another
system with an IPMI add in card.  Seems like at lot of extra stuff I
need to disable to secure my operations.  nmap shows ssh, http, https,
portmap and some other ports of unknown purpose (plus the silly thing
was configured to send email to the manufacture).  The web interface
is a little useful, but not when dealing with several hundred systems.

All I think I really want is basic (secure, encrypted) IPMI 2.0 to
read system status (power, temperature, fan status, etc) and be able
to power cycle the thing into a network PXE boot.

The Serial Over Lan stuff looks useful but overly complicated (I come
from a background where we used terminal servers for console access).
I would rather see no video board in the system at all, but nobody
seems to know how to build these boards anymore.

Stuart
-- 
I've never been lost; I was once bewildered for three days, but never lost!
                                        --  Daniel Boone