[TriLUG] Remote management with Cyclades

[Michael Alan Dorman]

Jason White <jason at jw2.org> writes:
> Just wanted to query the list to see if anyone has any experience with
> any of the remote management products that Cyclades[1] offers.
>
> We have several Linux and AIX servers that we would like to remotely
> manage -- down to the BIOS level, etc.  I've heard a lot of good
> things about Cyclades over the years (they run Linux on the hardware,
> they have good support for Linux, etc), so they are at the top of our
> vendor list.
>
> Along the same lines, has anyone ever used Conserver[2], which is an
> open-source product that allows multiple users to watch a serial
> console at the same time?  It supports just about every flavor of
> unix.  Just looking for some opionions, etc.  

I used the Cyclades TS-series high-density, linux-based terminal
servers in some with Sun machines a couple of years ago, largely
because they did SSH and were capable of higher density per rack-U
than anyone else at that time.

I liked the hardware quite a lot, although one of the software
components, I forget which, was very, *very* finicky about whitespace
in its config file.  I would hope they'd corrected that by now, but
it's not like it was a proprietary piece of code---they whole thing is
based on the same software you'd look to use to put together a linux
terminal server from scrath.

While I have no direct experience with conserver, last I heard that
was actually what cyclades were going to be using in a new revision of
their software to do history-monitoring for their terminal server.  I
left before that firmware was released.

Mike
-- 
The piano is firewood, Times Square is a dream -- Tom Waits