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Silicon Graphics servers used to have a separate serial port that proved access to a (very) simple state machine that controlled power to the system. Send a ‘

Silicon Graphics servers used to have a separate serial port that proved access to a (very) simple state machine that controlled power to the system. Send a ‘u’ it powered on. Send a ‘d’ it powered down. ‘s’ reported the state (IIRC). There was literally nothing that could go wrong. Then install the OS from the regular console port over the network with bootp/tftp/http. The complexity of DRAC/iLO setups to control an emulation of a VGA PC setup blows my mind.

gnufx 2y ago
> an emulation of a VGA PC setup IPMI does rather more than than giving you console access, though it's serial, not VGA. Typical server BMCs which embed IPMI do more again. Not to defend the quality of various BMC firmware and support I've encountered...
- blipvert 2y ago
  Oh, yes, absolutely - fair point. It was more the remote power/boot/install process which seems unnecessarily complicated these days compared to serial. An elegant weapon for a more civilised age, or something ;-)
  - BobbyTables2 2y ago
    Indeed, but iLO virtual media performance (at least used to be) so slow that it was silly. Booting a live cd or installing windows at 1MByte/s speeds (late 1990s CDROMs were faster!) is horribly slow. Maybe iLO5 was a bit better. usually found it easier (but annoying) to just walk over with a USB drive…
    - jasomill 2y ago
      Agreed — installing modern Windows from physical DVD-R media is painful enough. I've found iLO 4 virtual media support most useful for booting DOS-hosted firmware updates supplied as El Torito ISO images that aren't natively bootable from USB flash in a world where you can no longer find CD-R blanks at every corner drug store, and where newer machines commonly lack the legacy BIOS support required to boot the image at all. It's also a fine way to boot minimal BSD or Linux rescue/netinstall images that don't involve live-booting a full desktop environment, or for installing smallish OSes like ESXi in cases where trading increased wallclock time for slightly reduced effort is justifiable.
    - BuildTheRobots 2y ago
      If you use the web (or older java) console to share the ISO as a virtual drive then it tends to be dog slow. If you SSH into the iLO then you can point the virtual CD drive at a HTTP web server hosting the image which seems to be significantly quicker to read. It uses HTTP range requests for random IO too, so doesn't need to pre-read the entire ISO.

gnufx 2y ago

> an emulation of a VGA PC setup IPMI does rather more than than giving you console access, though it's serial, not VGA. Typical server BMCs which embed IPMI do more again. Not to defend the quality of various BMC firmware and support I've encountered...

blipvert 2y ago
Oh, yes, absolutely - fair point. It was more the remote power/boot/install process which seems unnecessarily complicated these days compared to serial. An elegant weapon for a more civilised age, or something ;-)
- BobbyTables2 2y ago
  Indeed, but iLO virtual media performance (at least used to be) so slow that it was silly. Booting a live cd or installing windows at 1MByte/s speeds (late 1990s CDROMs were faster!) is horribly slow. Maybe iLO5 was a bit better. usually found it easier (but annoying) to just walk over with a USB drive…
  - jasomill 2y ago
    Agreed — installing modern Windows from physical DVD-R media is painful enough. I've found iLO 4 virtual media support most useful for booting DOS-hosted firmware updates supplied as El Torito ISO images that aren't natively bootable from USB flash in a world where you can no longer find CD-R blanks at every corner drug store, and where newer machines commonly lack the legacy BIOS support required to boot the image at all. It's also a fine way to boot minimal BSD or Linux rescue/netinstall images that don't involve live-booting a full desktop environment, or for installing smallish OSes like ESXi in cases where trading increased wallclock time for slightly reduced effort is justifiable.
  - BuildTheRobots 2y ago
    If you use the web (or older java) console to share the ISO as a virtual drive then it tends to be dog slow. If you SSH into the iLO then you can point the virtual CD drive at a HTTP web server hosting the image which seems to be significantly quicker to read. It uses HTTP range requests for random IO too, so doesn't need to pre-read the entire ISO.