IPMI and Remote Management for Any Motherboard! PiKVM

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Timestamps:

[lesumsi]

"I'm a lucky owner of a Pi 4" has become an actual flex.

[ThisUploaded]

When looking into tech that could help with remote access via hardware I was incredibly surprised how expensive everything was.

It's really cool to see stuff like this continue to progress and bring a more affordable option to the masses.

[jeffnew]

This stuff is cute and can be handy in the odd situation. Just to put it in context though, you can buy an entire off-lease enterprise server with iLO or iDRAC out-of-band management for the cost of a Raspberry Pi.

[FreekDijkstra]

Very nice! To control my servers at home that are stowed away, I use a Marmitek MegaView 76, which is a KVM extender, basically running HDMI + USB signals over UTP Cat5 or Cat6. That said, I probably would have picked a PiKVM nowadays. Marmitek is rather expensive (over €150), and I had the opportunity to put a lot of spare UTP cabling through my house, but not everyone does have the required dedicated UTP cable. The PiKVM uses your regular LAN.

[ida]

If only piKvm was possible on old android phones, maybe even pinephone... No waste and might be even cheaper

[BaneCodes]

For my setup the mouse and keyboard option is disabled how to fix this? I see the red color icons

[rksydfs]

This is amazing! With tailscale or something similar installed you also wouldn't have to lookup the ip address..

[ChaosTheory]

Finally a use case for my old RPi 2B that was used for monitoring my terrarium environment years ago and has been in a drawer ever since it stopped working (probably because snek managed to pee a little into the enclosure somehow, maybe causing a short which then causes kernel panics) and I couldn't be bothered fixing it. Assuming it recovers from me brushing it with dish soap and rinsing it. We'll see.

[June]

A microcontroller like ESP32 can do similar when connected to a serial interface but consumes less power and costs a lot less.

[pavelperina]

Interesting for curiosity. I guess not cheap enough to be worth it and with RPI4 or RPI3 not much power efficient. I don't know about others, but in my experience SD cards in RPI have some weird tendency to die, industrial ones seems much safer, but not invincible. It might be bad luck. Also with power outage, filesystem might be found in random state (once I mysteriously lost partition table on SD card) so I don't trust it much. However, it might be interesting to use this for access to BIOS from other server if they can somehow emulate USB keyboard and mouse.

[bastian]

Maybe blur the phone number @ 5:06 if you still use that. I use the blikvm and it works well. but the included fan is worthless etc. I would rather have paid less, and have (part of) the cables as an option. I still think It costs a lot for what it is, but it works wel and still is cheaper then many things.

[jerryinfeld]

At the same time the PiKVM is attached to the server, can you also have a local monitor, keyboard and mouse attached to the server? Does the PiKVM do KVM passthrough?

[jeschinstad]

Why don't they draw power from the PCIe that is already connected to the mobo? Seems strange to need an internal USB cable for that, no?

[lawrencemanning]

A nice solution. But IMO serial consoles still have a use case. 99% of Linux server issues can be resolved using a good old serial console. Decent BIOSes will propagate the console for the BIOS to the serial port. Not much use for windows servers, of course.

[GJoseeph]

Thanks for this content, I didn't knew anything about pikvm but I think it's an alternative tool for my server. Old Core 2 Quad with 3 1TB HDD as RAID 5, there's a couple of upgrades I would like to do in future, increase Storage with an HBA up to 12 drives, remote power on from the phone, today I can only remote shutdown, and a SAI PSU to safe shutdown in case of powerdrop or a 2nd server to backup and also mount remote CIFS/FTP to 1st server. Meanwhile I see you're in another Server/Homelab level, thanks for all the guides and content.

[smol_yote]

I’m currently making one my homelab using an existing pci-e slot. It’s based off of Geekworm’s A-8. However if I could in the future I’d want to create something that uses an internal usb3 header for video + usb controls along with a pci-e 6 pin connector for power.

I’d love for only port that comes out of the expansion slot to be an rj45 port. However I also would consider adding a small usb splitter to have a few ports for the usb 3 header or an hdmi port tied to an hdmi splitter for it to be adjacent to the RJ45 ((maybe both cause why not?))

It’s mostly just to have an emergency setup incase my reverse proxy messes up and I can’t access my machine over https

[GreySectoid]

Would be nice if the pci card gizmo worked as an internal gpu, because most servers don't have gpu itself.

[dgan]

I actually broke out laughing at 9:10 lmao

[parameterized]

Why do you need an USB Splitter? Doesn't a USB A on the Pi to USB A on the PC work, with an additional USB C Powersupply?

[ProTimax]

Great video! I didn't ever imagine that those tv boxes are so easily flashable, this opens up so many possibilities, not only for IKVMs but replacing RPI in general. If it wasn't for RPI shortage it probably wouldn't be worth the trouble, but since they are dirt cheap (especially used ones), might as well "convert" one just for sport :D