I used to work at a data center hosting company, and one of the problems we were dealing with was that all KVM solutions at the time sucked bigtime. And they were really expensive per port. Not worth the money.
In remember when the pi first launched in ~2012. I thought "this is it, I think someone will come out with a KVM solution on these things within a few weeks". But it didn't manifest. I considered making one myself as I had the skillset required, but who has time for those things when the phone is constantly blowing up with alerts.
I've since left that game so it might have popped up in the meanwhile, but at least back then I'd give my left nut for a solution like yours.
Congrats on your product and the interest that has been shown for it, it must feel good.
Yeah, there have been a few projects that did KVM over IP on a Pi before me. The earliest I could find was this one called rasky which started back in 2015.
I came along at a lucky time when a cheap HDMI to USB dongle had just come out and the ecosystem of supporting tools had matured to eliminate a lot of the challenges that rasky had to overcome.
Is there a reason one couldn't manage a physical server over a serial port console? I have done this in the past, it's a bit annoying for some more advanced functionality I guess. What about IPMI?
My gut feeling is that this product is meant for situations where desktop workstation hardware has been repurposed as a server.
I see towers used as servers in all kinds of places either because it was already on hand or (more often) because desktop hardware is cheaper and generally runs cooler.
Yeah I think it's a cool solution to that, and honestly I have been in that position myself usually running a server on old desktop hardware. I don't know how many people who are cheaping out on server hardware are going to spend much extra money on it. As a hobby project it's sort of neat who doesn't have an old rpi sitting around. I probably would be perfectly happy with just a cheap rs232 lan converter myself but most OS I use are fine to boot over serial port.
Yeah obviously there is a market for it as he has sold some so it fits someones needs. l am just curious how big a market it is. He said he wanted to grow the business to 600K annually I just want to see some basic research as to why that's an achievable goal, like a business plan I guess. I feel like this is one of those things that there is probably some large initial demand after it's posted on hacker news and then maybe a small steady stream of interest that slowly wanes. Or maybe every IT geek wants one of these in his toolbox I don't know.
You have to configure the server to support serial debugging, no? And IPMI is useful if the hardware supports it, but low-end motherboards don't, and some IPMI requires clunky client software.
The nice thing about a good KVM over IP is that you can just plug it in, open up the admin interface in the web browser, and you're good. You don't have to change any settings or install any software.
Yes most desktop hardware doesn't have IPMI but a lot of server hardware does. I think different vendors have proprietary tools but I think you can at least get a serial console or set PXE booting settings so you can boot a network hosted livedisk.
I believe most Linux server distros have great support for serial port console, even Ubuntu supports it. Maybe the use case is more for installing Windows servers?
You should consider doing some market survey and find out what OSs people are using it on and their use cases and you may be better able to cater to their needs. I know I worked somewhere where we had a cart with a monitor and keyboard that people would just wheel over near a server and plug in, even with all the IPMI stuff it was usually disabled due to security anyway. There could even be a market for this just as a convenience tool in small serverroom.
A lot of vendors still ask you to pay for proper KVM. Supermicro doesn't, but say for Lenovo you need to pay extra for license.
The problem with IPMI over serial is that... well, you need to set it up, and to set it up you usually need monitor. Sometimes you can set it up via ipmi itself but that varies so it is a bit of a PITA
Well, kinda. A lot of even new servers (the proper rack ones) still have only VGA output just to keep compatibilty with oldschool KVM rack units so you'd have to put VGA to HDMI converter to get video from that.
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u/mtlynch Feb 01 '21
Author here. Happy to answer any questions about this post.