I’m no administrator but I do have to keep an eye on some machines and do some administrative tasks. I was able to bring a machine down by doing a dist-upgrade and accidentally upgrading a kernel without a necessary network module. I learned a lot from this experience :)
I’m in Estonia and the server is in the US. I didn’t know what my options were, I imagined that somebody would go to the server room and boot it up with a Live CD. Once network gets configured I’m let in.
Nope. I was sent email instructions to a KVM (Keyboard – Video – Mouse) frontend and the machine was rebooted.
KVM is a physical switch int the server room which takes the input/output of the server and lets you use that input/output over the network.
The frontend presents you with a Java applet where you can see the video output of the machine. Keyboard and mouse work as usual.
The frontend even lets you mount an ISO from your HDD that will be mounted by the machine as an USB drive. This is really sloooooow. The other option is mounting an ISO from the network as an USB drive, faster. So starting from a Live CD is something you can do yourself.
I mounted an ISO with the necessary module, ran it as a Live CD, mounted the HDDs, chrooted to the old root and was able to do a simple dpkg -i packageName from the CD.
Administrators do have cool tools and it is possible to administrate machines over the Atlantic even when they don’t boot up :)
Tags: linux