redhat itself

Wed Aug 10 19:46:48 UTC 2016

Hi,

I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux, (RHEL), all the time at work. We manage
servers running RHEL, a lot of them Dell Poweredge rack mounts or Dell
blades. When new hardware comes in, I try to get them to set up things so
that the serial over LAN settings in the BIOS are enabled and, with a couple
of tweaks to the grub.conf file, I can get the RHEL  console redirected and
then I ssh to the ILO/IDRAC card where I then have full console access so
that I can solve boot up issues or access the server when all its network
interfaces are dead.

It is very rare these days that I actually do an OS installation as we have
kickstart files which run OS installs these days so they come up as a
standard build for a customer.

In this environment, it doesn't matter a bit really what flavour of Linux is
used. It isn't Linux that is accessible or not. If you have ssh access to
the console and then, once the OS is up and running, via any network
connection, you can do everything whatever the Linux flavour.

Now this is fine for the good old physical server world. My big problem is
that so much is going virtual now. We use VMWare for virtualisation and I
just cannot access the console of a VMWare VM running RHEL because these
seem only to be accessible through horrible Java GUI's which are only seen
through vCenter. To get to vCenter across a network, I would need to RDP
from a terminal server which is impossible. Even if I could do this, I
couldn't use the Java GUI as that is hopeless with most screen readers I
know. Before anyone suggests it, there is No such thing as direct access to
vCenter with a command line interface in the corporate world. I've tried for
it. You have my employer's corporate network policies, the customer's own
access policies and everything else blocking this.

I have asked before on here if anyone has solutions in this area and I only
met with sympathy as several other people seem to have hit the same problem
but not yet found a solution.

I just hope physical servers stay around a bit longer.

Cheers,
Phil.

-----Original Message-----
From: blinux-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:blinux-list-bounces at redhat.com]
On Behalf Of John G Heim
Sent: 10 August 2016 16:48
To: Linux for blind general discussion
Subject: Re: redhat itself

Surely there must be somebody building kernels with those modules so that
you can  install by adding their yum repository to your system. If not, it
would mean that a blind RH systems admin couldn't do his work at the
console. If remote access is broken he'd be in serious trouble. Most systems
admins don't have a choice as to what flavor of linux they use in their job.
Here at the University of Wisconsin, the IT department used to run Red Hat.
The campus had a site license. The Math Department, where I work, uses
debian and ubuntu. But if I worked in another department, I'd probably be
stuck with RH.

I have been building kernels for debian and ubuntu that have a hack do
serial synths work. I set up a apt repository at www.iavit.org so other
people can use them too. I don't know anything about Red Hat but surely
there must be the equivalent of a ppa.

On 08/10/2016 09:10 AM, Janina Sajka wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Well, I've moved from Fedora to Arch on any machine where I need 
> Speakup. The reason is that rpmfusion has not provided kernel staging 
> modules since kernel 4.0.4.
>
> So, I had the choice of constantly building my own, or switching 
> distros. I chose the latter.
>
> I am still running Fedora on my data center server, but I don't use 
> Speakup on that machine, of course.
>
> Janina
>
> Willem van der Walt writes:
>> Redhat these days is mostly used on servers as one buys support for 
>> that, but it is accessible.
>> I ran Redhat years ago, but these days, I think, Janina is still 
>> running it or Fedora without problems.
>> HTH, Willem
>>
>>
>> On Sat, 6 Aug 2016, Mark Peveto wrote:
>>
>>> Hmm, I noticed this is hosted on redhat.com.  Does redhat have an
accessible distro?
>>>
>>> Everything happens after coffee!
>>>
>>> Mark Peveto
>>> Registered Linux user number 600552
>>> Sent from sonar using alpine 2.20.14
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Blinux-list mailing list
>>> Blinux-list at redhat.com
>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>>>
>>>
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--
--
John G. Heim; jheim at math.wisc.edu; sip://jheim@sip.linphone.org

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