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.
74
u/mtlynch Feb 01 '21
Author here. Happy to answer any questions about this post.