Remote maintenance of servers...

I'm going to geek out a bit with this entry. Apologies to you non-techies.

To keep myself entertained during my time between jobs, I've decided to get myself a server to host a few projects I've been working on. I don't want to host them on a home sever because a home server is too noisy and too warm. Besides, I'd have to share the outbound traffic with my web surfing. So, rather than getting more bandwith at home, I can just put the server in a data center for just a little bit more money.

And there's the issue. It's in a data center. Behind locked doors. No monitor or keyboard. So, how do I access it? An Serial-over-IP device would be cool, but they're expensive and don't do much. I've looked into IPMI, which my server supports, but It needs a VPN to get out of the local network. I've found a KVM-over-IP device that looks pretty cool, but I need to get it shipped out from the US.

But, there's always the option of putting a DVD in the DVD drive. Most of the time it won't be used. In fact, I'll probably not use it unless I need to do an install from the console. So, I'm thinking having a Linux live dvd might be a good thing to keep in it, just in case of an emergency. I got Puppy Linux to work, but it doesn't have LVM in the package, so it looks like I'm off to figure out another option with a different distro, or trying to work out how to get LVM into Puppy Linux...

At least it keeps me out of trouble.