On Tue, 1 Jun 2021, Marco van Beek via GLLUG wrote:
As many others have already said. the ideal is if this is part of the
baseboard management tool of the servers. Although both DELL and HP call it
by their own names (and often charge extra for additional features) the
generic term is IPMI, or Intelligent Platform Management Interface
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Platform_Management_Interface).
However, you do have to buy servers that support this, but it gives you a lot
of control, and is a lot cheaper that a compilation of a networked KVM and a
networked PDU. In most cases it is brought out as a separate Ethernet port on
the back of the server, which means you can run it on a completely separate
network should you wish for security purposes.
I've been working on a rpi 4 version of this. The pi4 supports gadget
mode and host mode simultaneously so I have a HDMI framegrabber (and
VGA->HDMI for the machines that don't support HDMI) along with a 4 way
HDMI kvm switch to allow me to control four machines from a single RPI
(for circa 100GBP).
There are other solutions on the web but all of them use the standard
USB keyboard gadget that doesn't work with every bios that I have so
I've had to build my own.
Let me know if you're interested but it's not quite "production ready"
yet - the electronics to control the power and reset switches and
monitor the power and HDD led are on a breadboard at the moment...
Tim.
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