Rudi Ahlers <rudiahlers@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> Definitely :) This is a isolated case. But many, many of my other servers,
> worldwide, run without every seen a KVM. And very few of them ever had a
> hardware issues that would ever have required a KVM. I tend to upgrade /
> replace servers long before the hardware even gets a chance to get old
> enough to use a KVM to diagnose. I can SSH into any server and do whatever I
> need to.
A serial console is far superior to a KVM. Ok, so
the kernel panicked last night, the box rebooted and it's fine now.
how do you tell what went wrong? If you have a logging serial console,
you have the backtrace right there. If you have a KVM, you are out
of luck. The data center guys are going to shrug and say it's working
fine now. You want I take it offline and run memtest? well, if it was
an oom-killer problem, you've just taken an additional few hours downtime,
chasing the wrong problem, when the real problem would have been obvious,
if you sprang for another $10 in parts.
If a server reboots and I don't know why, that server gets taken out of
production. unclean reboots on your Xen0 are quite expensive.
A serial console is next to free. I give a port away with every U I
rent out. You can get a used 32-port Cyclades on ebay for around $300,
or if you are even cheaper, it's simple enough to use the buddy system
(server A has the console for server B, server B has the console for server
A... you are good as long as they don't both fail at the same time.)
I know I sound a bit... ticked. but I can't count the number of times a
client has asked me to figure out why a server rebooted last night (a
reasonable request) only to find that they don't have a logging
serial console. Half the time they have DRAC, which can be configured as
a serial console or as a kvm, but they have it setup as a kvm! that means
they blew $300 extra, and now I can't help them anyway.
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