Laptop as USB display device for server rack monitoring ?

[Kyrre Ness Sjobak]

tir, 16.11.2004 kl. 18.48 skrev Kim Lux:
> Lets say I've got a rack of headless servers.  They do have a video
> card, but no monitor.  Lets say that one of them is giving trouble -
> won't boot, no network, etc.  The way it is right now, I have to cart a
> monitor over to the machine in question and hook it and a mouse and
> keyboard up before I can work on it.
> 
> Is there a way in Linux to use a USB or firewire equipped laptop as the
> monitor/keyboard/mouse for the servers on the rack ?  Could one have a
> USB port on the front of each server and direct some sort of video
> output from it to the laptop and use the laptop display/keyboard/mouse
> as the input to the server ?
> 
> I know about X11 and X11 forwarding and that works fine for a lot of
> things, but it doesn't work for watching the machine during the boot
> process and it won't work on a machine that has a network issue. 
> 
> What I am asking for, I guess, is a virtual (software) video card
> (device) in the server that takes the X11 display commands that would
> have been sent to the video card and redirects them, via the USB cable
> to my laptop display.  The laptop would have to be running some sort of
> USB device software as well.
> 
> Even better would be to be able to use the hard drive/cdrom drive of the
> laptop as if they were part of the server as well.
> 
> I know it would be difficult to see all of the boot process, but if the
> virtual display driver got loaded early on, you could at least see the
> rest of the boot process. 
> 
> Does anyone know of something like this ?  I've looked and I can't find
> anything. 
> 
> Thanks
> 
> -- 
> Kim Lux (Mr.)  Diesel Research Inc

I think you should rather be looking for one of those LAN-based admin
pci cards...