On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 09:11 +0000, Jonathan McDowell wrote:
Yup. Most modern server motherboards have the option to do that anyway these days, if they're anyway decent.
It's always been a weakness of the X86 platform, it was never designed to be a server platform from the outset and so therefore lacks some of the better management features like this in the core design.
Actually most of the legacy server platforms (Sparc, Alpha and I think Mips) have a serial pre-boot console and have had since the dawn of time.
One of my trusty Alpha's even has a modem port that can autodial a pager number in the event that certain hardware events occur, otherwise you can use the same modem to dial into the SCU (Alpha bios setup equiv) (even if the machine is turned off) as the modem console runs on a separate microprocessor that stays powered as long as there is a mains supply (there is a PC equiv of this but it's a 3rd party board). Comes in really handy if you have to real with a remote machine that has completely hung..simply dial in and force a cold boot.
What would be really cool is if on a PC you could assign unique i2c bus device ID's (i2c bus is present on all modern mainboards, it's how the information passes for lmsensors etc) then you could dasychain a rack of such systems together and monitor *everything* from one place.
Just to tempt me some of the miniITX kit has the i2c bus on a header, waiting for me to muck around with it...you have to be careful though, we are talking about what can be done to stuff a board when working with the Bios contents, that's nothing compared to what you could do with i2c.
On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 08:37 +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
I might "invest" in a cheap EPROM programmer so I can play, but having looked at the BIOS Saviours in the past they're great products but overkill for anything I'm doing. I do have an old EPROM blower (and a UV prom erasor) kicking around somewhere, but I think technology might have moved on a bit past them now.
Erm no I wouldn't go plugging modern EEPROM/Flash based Bios chips into an old Eprom programmer, or you may be needing that BIOSsaviour more quickly than you think :-)