Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandreas | Hacker News Reader

I really like IPMI, but what I don't like about it for homelab use cases is the additional ~5W of idle power consumption. Using the Gigabyte MC12-LE0 Board with Ryzen Pro 5650 for a home server should be a no brainer costing ~50 bucks, but the higher power consumption is something I'm not totally happy with.

On older devices (like Dell T20/T30) there is Intel AMT which is way less powerful and has security flaws, but at least SOME way to do remote administration when used with MeshCommander (unfortunately discontinued and releases deleted from everywhere - but I luckily saved the MSI and Node-Package on my server).

I'm planning to try out PiKVM (V2) with a Raspberry 4 and a simple 8 bucks USB-HDMI-Capture-Card (https://docs.pikvm.org/v2/). Besides the lack of some features, it looks promising and more universal for devices that do not support remote management in any form.

View on HN

> I really like IPMI, but what I don't like about it for homelab use cases is the additional ~5W of idle power consumption.

How much more power is dissipated clearly depends on the quality of the PSU (constructing a power supply which is efficient at high loads and idle is quite a challenge). I doubt the BMC (sometimes built-in to the NIC) takes nearly that much.

> I'm planning to try out PiKVM (V2) with a Raspberry 4

That'll exceed 5W though.

Most of the boards I've tested with ASPEED chips consume between 5-7W when IPMI is running, and the system is powered off. They aren't all that efficient.

RPi 4 idles at around 3W and peaks at 5-6W so on average should be better.

> How much more power is dissipated clearly depends on the quality of the PSU

Yeah I know - while "quality" (I assume efficiency) is not the only factor, because low tier PSU (<200W, like Pico PSU) are far less consuming below 20W.

> That'll exceed 5W though.

Only running all the time. Paired with a Tasmota Shelly Plug it consumes near 0W. Additionally it is Board independent and together with a HDMI- / USB-KVM-Switch it can be used for multiple hosts.

I also thought about using PiKVM similar devices on my Banana PI 3 OpenWRT router, so this thing is running all the time and powerful enough to handle this.

Similarly I'm looking into the nano kvm now the firmware is open https://github.com/sipeed/NanoKVM

Update, perhaps I was miss-informed. Looks like the firmware isn't in the repo, just the web interface.

Disappointing, I had read on a blog somewhere recently that they had released the firmware and didn't look into it deeply enough

> the backend will be open-sourced soon (after the GitHub repository reaches 2K stars).

https://en.wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/kvm/NanoKVM/system/in...

I would love to see an OpenWRT implementation, so that your router can be your KVM device :-)

I believe, that few, if any of the currently supported boards feature all of: USB Device Port, HDMI-Port (or sufficiently fast USB-Host-Port for Capture Adapter), HW-Video-Encode (or beafy enough CPU), enough available (programmable) GPIOs

I think with Wifi 6e and 7 this is no longer true. Most of these devices are really powerful supporting at least one usb3 port. This is probably no longer a problem in the near future, especially when 1080p is enough.

MeshCommander releases are still available -- https://www.meshcommander.com/ Can also still be installed from NPM.

Also haven't tried it out, but I believe this is aiming to be the successor: https://meshcentral.com/

MeshCommander 0.96 is available on its website again; from what ive read the dev has been settling into a new job

Reply on news.ycombinator.com