Home
| Calendar
| Mail Lists
| List Archives
| Desktop SIG
| Hardware Hacking SIG
Wiki | Flickr | PicasaWeb | Video | Maps & Directions | Installfests | Keysignings Linux Cafe | Meeting Notes | Linux Links | Bling | About BLU |
My last employer owned four Raritan Dominion KX-432 units. I wound up detesting them for several reasons, but kept them in place as a backup to the solution we migrated into. What was good about Raritan: relative ease of setup, full mouse/keyboard/graphics support, support for a couple of client options other than just Windows. What was bad: the units had a bad habit of crashing every few weeks, there was a very weird firmware bug in the keyboard logic (if you type faster than 30wpm, it inserts extra characters), they cost a lot, it becomes very difficult to keep track of which server is connected to which KVM switch if you have more than 2, and unless you pony up a huge amount of extra $$$, only 1 or 2 people can use the thing at a time. That latter point makes it useless for a busy QA lab with all 32 ports connected and two or three engineers are up against a deadline re-imaging servers. All the above problems were solved at a very similar per-port price point ($300 give or take) using Dell DRAC or HP ILO cards. Someone already pointed out the negative of that solution: you have to build out a separate physical LAN, at a cost of about $20-50 per port for cables and switches plus labor. But the upside of that is you get to create separate DNS entries for every console, which makes things vastly easier to manage if you've got more than a few dozen servers. -rich
BLU is a member of BostonUserGroups | |
We also thank MIT for the use of their facilities. |