On 5 Mar 2004, at 17:01, Chris Dagdigian wrote: > > I can actually answer Tim's question somewhat although my partner Bill > knows best -- I've seen him make apple clusters thousands of miles > away jump through hoops with nothing but a text based ssh connection. > heh. > > When it comes to the real hands-off management that Tim and people > like his group need (lots of hardware, physically located elsewhere, > no GUI access desired, etc) this is what I have personally seen: > > 1. Anything that can be done via a GUI on OS X can now be done via a > command-line or via automated scripting. The inclusion of a serial > port on the rackmount version of Apple's hardware means you can do > this via a standard getty attached to a cyclades terminal server or > equiv box. I know about that. Which is why I asked how to reboot a crashed machine remotely. i.e. a kernel panic, when your serial console and ssh are both useless. On all of our farm machines (AlphaServers, RLX blades, and IBM blades) we can perform a full power cycle remotely to get out of that situation. I want to know whether there's some sort of similar out-of-band management on the XServe. > 2. remote power on a dead/crashed apple system is only possible with > out of band power devices like smart powerstrips from APC or Baytech Ah, OK, thanks, that's what I was after. Not possible without third party kit. Our IBM blades, in particular, have some nice CLI tools for this sort of thing. rpower -a off is a somewhat abrupt way to stop the cluster in its tracks. :-) > The fact is though, regardlesss of Apple vs X68 I'd still probably be > using a Digicom or Cyclades terminal server as well as a nice network > addressable powerstrip. This gives me remote console access and remote > power control (very desirable for most clusters, absolute requirement > for large systems) without having to rely on any sort of technolgy > from the server vendor. That's a fair point. Tim -- Dr Tim Cutts Informatics Systems Group Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK