System information

1.4 Remote Management Tools
of the device provides access to the serial port to emulate keystrokes or mouse movements.
The screen content is fetched from the graphic card and provided to remote computers.
1.4.2 BIOS Console Redirection
The main-board manufactures equip their products with hardware based remote mainte-
nance units. The remote console is one of the widespread remote access tools for computer
systems. Thereby, one of the computer’s serial interfaces provides access to the screen of
the computer at boot time. However, the serial interface can only redirect text content but
cannot send graphical content. The main usage of the console redirection is the remote
configuration of the BIOS CMOS. But to use this feature a serial to Ethernet adapter has
to be plugged into the serial port of the host computer.
1.4.3 IPMI
The Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) specification defines a set of com-
mon interfaces to the platform management subsystem of a computer system [26, 27]. These
interfaces are used to monitor the health of a system and manage it. The first IPMI spec-
ification was announced in the year 1998 by Dell, HP, Intel Corporation and the NEC
Corporation [26]. The key characteristic of the IPMI is that the main control functions are
available independently of the main processor. Therefore, the IPMI operates independently
of the operating system (OS) and allows administrators to manage a system remotely even
in the absence of the OS. The heart of the IPMI architecture is the Baseboard Management
Controller (BMC) [27]. It provides the intelligence behind intelligent platform manage-
ment. The BMC controls the interface between system management software and platform
management hardware. Additional management controllers can be connected to the BMC
using the IPMB which is a serial bus used for communication to and between management
controllers [26].
1.4.4 Remote Management Cards
KVM devices or the console redirection feature do not support the installation of an oper-
ating system in a remote way, because they do not provide boot device. As a general rule,
critical servers are equipped with a remote management card or an onboard remote man-
agement utility. They provide features beyond of KVM function. The most of the remote
management cards support a wide variety of management issues as for example a separate
network connectivity through a built-in network adapter, a browser (http and https) ac-
cessible management interface, hardware event logging, terminal access to system console,
providing a boot device, separate power source, restart, power up and power down features.
As a general rule, remote management cards are out-of-band management utilities which
use a dedicated management channel [28]. It provides remote control of a computer system
regardless of whether the machine is powered on. In contrast, an in-band management
utility is the use of regular data channels.
Figure 1.3 depicts a typical setup of a server managed remotely. The remote management
card could either share the same network environment as the host system or use a separate
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