Laptop as USB display device for server rack monitoring ?

[Jim Martin]

Kyrre Ness Sjobak wrote:

>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...
>
>  
>
actually, what i use in my rack is a rack mount kb/monitor which folds 
falt when not in use and slides into the rack and a 10 port rack mount 
kvm, got my kb/monitor on ebay for 150.00 and the kvm is about 100, 
cheaper than a laptop, and bult into the rack.

Jim