Wanted: remote controllable DVD drives

April 5, 2007

With remoteable KVMs and power outlets that can be remote controlled, there is only one important missing bit until I can give up visiting machine rooms almost entirely: a remote-controllable DVD drive.

The easiest way to do this would be with a USB device that pretended to be a DVD ROM drive, but was actually a big pool of disk space with ISO images. You'd give it an Ethernet connection so you could control it remotely to 'switch' the 'discs' and so on.

(Since Linux has target mode USB drivers, I believe you could actually build this today with the right hardware and some work. You'd want a machine with a lot of USB connections so you can hook it up to as many servers at once as possible.)

Our local experiences is that modern hardware and modern operating systems are generally happy to boot and install from USB DVD drives, but your mileage may vary.

(If you are spec'ing new servers, please give them DVD drives. Unless you are buying in industrial quantities, the amount of money you'll save by doing otherwise is not worth the aggravation, and probably literally not worth the cost of the wasted staff time.)


Comments on this page:

From 67.181.30.74 at 2007-04-06 02:21:36:

USB is not a network. It's more like an ISA bus. Hosts and devices are entirely different. So, in order to emulate a USB DVD you have to have an appropriate silicon chip. Blade centers from Sun and HP have such circuits (ILOM and iLO respectively). IBM and Dell do not have such capability. -- Pete

By cks at 2007-04-06 14:51:02:

My optimistic hope is that there are PCI/PCIe cards with USB device hardware on them, so you could stick the cards into a suitable host machine. If they're integrated-only at the moment, well, so much for that clever idea.

From 4.78.205.35 at 2007-04-27 21:09:47:

Dell has had "Virtual Media" support through their DRAC interfaces going back to at least their 6th-gen (circa 2002) machines. It's changed over time from a TFTP'able floppy to presenting an ISO or device from the admin's workstation.

That said, put your media on the network. If you're looking for installations, start netboot'ing -- any PC hardware being sold now should be able to PXE boot. Why save the frustration of not having an optical drive when you still have to have the frustration of "to whom did I loan the latest patch/update install media for that OS???". If its post-install, then a NFS/CIFS/FTP/whatever software repository is in order -- if you need to find and insert the media when you're setting up the server, what are you going to do when its dead and you have to rebuild it in a rush?

By cks at 2007-04-27 22:08:32:

My answer to this is pretty much in NetbootProblems.

(This illustrates that WanderingThoughts could really use a 'related entries' feature. Unfortunately implementation will be challenging due to the peculiar constraints DWiki operates under.)

Written on 05 April 2007.
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Last modified: Thu Apr 5 22:11:25 2007
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