Dell PowerEdge Virtual Media

[Randi Harper]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 7:01 PM, Stuart Barkley <stuartb at 4gh.net> wrote:
> 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?

Virtual Media is usually crap, in my experience. It's slow as hell and buggy.

> 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.

I've never even seen an IPMI web interface. I found IPMI handy (when
it worked) when it came to rebooting a frozen server - although you're
running FreeBSD, so that shouldn't be a problem. ;) It's also nice for
detecting hardware faults. Clearly it's something that needs to be
carefully configured for your environment.

> 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.

SoL works sometimes. It's another one of those slightly buggy things
that you can't always count on. It *looks* useful, but usually if your
machine is in a bad state - when you need it most - it's not going to
work.

-- randi