Options for iLo or an iLo alternative?

[deanfourie]

Just curious,

I'm after a iLo alternative or similar for access to my Proxmox host. I want to be able to access the BIOS remotely in the case of lets say, a kernel panic.

What options are available for this. I've read up a bit on Intel AMT, is this an option? I'm running Proxmox on a HP SFF machine and its pretty solid, but I have had about 2 kernel panics so having access to the BIOS to force reboot would be easier then sticking an ESP32 inside the machine and physically shorty the power button haha.

And lets be honest, Having BIOS access remotely is just plain handy.

Any ideas?
Thanks

 

[Astraea]

I use a Raspberry Pi setup using PiKVM, I built a custom cable to allow me to connect the USB-C to a KVM switch as I have more than one server and not back-feed power and then connected power and network to the pi. I can remote in and use keyboard shortcuts to switch between the machines connected to the KVM and it lets me have full remote control of the system and if things are really stuck I still have iLo/iDRAC to hard rest the machines without having to go to the rack.

 

[aaron]

In my experience, you want to buy a motherboard with an IPMI -> server boards and some workstation boards.

AFAICT there is some hardware that can run PiKVM with additional pins to connect to the power & reset pins of the motherboard. But if you run some small 1L machine, I doubt that those pins would be exposed as they would be on a regular motherboard.

 

[LnxBil]

Just curious,

I'm after a iLo alternative or similar for access to my Proxmox host. I want to be able to access the BIOS remotely in the case of lets say, a kernel panic.

What options are available for this. I've read up a bit on Intel AMT, is this an option? I'm running Proxmox on a HP SFF machine and its pretty solid, but I have had about 2 kernel panics so having access to the BIOS to force reboot would be easier then sticking an ESP32 inside the machine and physically shorty the power button haha.

And lets be honest, Having BIOS access remotely is just plain handy.

Any ideas?
Thanks

Do you talk about BIOS or the management controller / baseboard controller? The latter is for all HP workstations and server ILO (integrated lights-out), for Dell it's called idrac, for fujitsu irmc and so on. All of those (at least in recent versions) do offer SSH access (as well as http(s), ipmi-over-lan, etc.) so that you can reset your server remotely.

You can also play around with their hardware watchdog, which should reset your machine on a panic that hangs your kernel.