On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, Paul Brosseau wrote:
As for the dial-in thing, That is the old way of doing things. Today you want to leverage your network to do things. I think that filers should have an option to hook a modem directly up to the console port, but the usefulness of such a feature is pretty limited. The product design is network centric. In the old days the network used to be unreliable. Today's switched netwoorks are probably the mostreliable part of the computing infrastructure. Except of course for your filers ;-)
I'd consider out of band modem access to be there not for when the network screws up, but for when I screw up the network... :)
Our console server has saved my bacon at least two or three times over the past 18 months. It also allows me to completely reconfigure our network (upgrade switch / router / load balancer firmware, or play with internal routing for example) without having to be onsite.
My one gripe about filers in this regard is that it's not possible to manipulate the power supply remotely. All of our other servers (HP 9000s and Netservers) allow me to literally power them down and bring them back up again. Very handy in the unlikely event of the machine completely locking up.
-Ronan