It’s a cheap (starts at US$20 each; a nicer version with a OLED display and some other bells and whistles is $40) iKVM system based on RISC-V. Great if your NAS doesn’t include IPMI, but you still want a remote console. No affiliation at all with the seller, but I just ordered a few.
The site suggests that it also supports mounting storage remotely, but even if not I’d consider it worthwhile. Now to see if I can find a printable case for the Lite version…
TL;DNR:
I may have to investigate using a better remote console device, like the one listed above, due to issues with my existing remote serial console device.
Two weeks ago I was doing an update of my miniature PC used for both media and other misc. master copy of files, (scripts, help files, etc…). As part of the update, both OpenZFS and Dracut, (used to make initial RAM disks), were updated. So it was time to make a new InitRAM disk and add a new Grub entry for it.
Disaster struck!
Un-bootable!
Even lost my remote serial console!
Okay, a bit of hyperbola. Booting that same boot environment using the old InitRAM disk worked. So I re-created a new one, still problems and then I had serial console problems.
Eventually I figured it out and all is good. Dracut used to default to “gzip” InitRAM disk compression, but now defaults to “zstd” which my kernel build does not support. Easy fix, and warned me to be careful on my desktop & laptop upgrades.
However, during trouble shooting, I had to make at least 10 trips to my home “data center”, (unused bedroom). Something with remote power off & on, as well as BIOS access might just have made those trips un-needed.
