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Comment by alpb | Hacker News Reader

> We've hacked together a Ruby script that retrieves a console screenshot via IPMI and checks the color in the image to determine if we've hit a failure or not.

That's pretty funny yet sounds a lot familiar to many of us as every now and then we all do these sort of nasty hacks.

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Also probably a lot better than to make MemTest86 do all sorts of network stuff.

Hah! I wrote a script a few months back and had to solve an issue of figuring out the state of a program running under wine, and that was my solution (to not in ruby, just a quick bash script). I was pretty happy with the results but if felt like an incredibly crude way to solve the problem, now I read that this is being used at much higher levels than I'll get to, maybe it's not so bad :)

Ya, I came here to talk about that line as well. The whole article was interesting, but that line stood out as a pretty surprising hack for 2015.

Yikes, having attended a computer vision conference last week, that sort of apporach is actually starting to sound reasonable and intelligent!

Vs just buying opengear console servers and something like conserver to get the actual text via serial like most large Unix environments (every job I've worked at) do. Then you can just scrape the text.

Right, this surprised me. They're doing IPMI, so why not SOL (Serial over LAN) to get the raw stream?

Actually, on second thoughts, I'm not surprised so much. I've read many threads on Supermicro IPMI and people's frustration with it (reliant on outdated Java, and hacked together wrappers over VNC) that make it seem like a deliberate choice to obfuscate things -just- enough to make other tools difficult.

No a career building those types of tools taught me SoL is garbage from most vendors. Cray, Dell, and HP are (arguably) best with mostly reliable SoL, but they still are awful. If you paste a buffer too big into a SoL session, the dell DRAC will freeze, so you have to kill and restart the serial connection. If you have > 1000 machines, hardware serial is the best thing to do for management, in addition to IPMI for power management.

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