Has anyone managed to get any PCI or PCI Express based DRAC/iDRAC/HP-ILO (or other) boards working in any capacity in a system in which they were not intended? Many of the older boards are cheap on the used market but some interface over a secondary bus as well as the PCI or PCI Express bus.
The DRAC 4 board has a PCI interface along with a ribbon cable and goes for pretty cheap. It has an onboard ATI graphics chip so I assume that the video is not travelling to the board from the motherboard.
I'm not concerned with the remote power on ability, I can already do that with Wake On Lan and it works.
If anyone has any of these kinds of boards, can you stick one in a non-server and post what if anything it does without the extra stuff connected?
Incidentally, I've seen a Lantronix Spider Duo IP KVM in use before and was impressed that it allows you to mount an ISO for remote OS installation just like a DRAC can do.
The DRAC 4 board has a PCI interface along with a ribbon cable and goes for pretty cheap. It has an onboard ATI graphics chip so I assume that the video is not travelling to the board from the motherboard.
I'm not concerned with the remote power on ability, I can already do that with Wake On Lan and it works.
If anyone has any of these kinds of boards, can you stick one in a non-server and post what if anything it does without the extra stuff connected?
Incidentally, I've seen a Lantronix Spider Duo IP KVM in use before and was impressed that it allows you to mount an ISO for remote OS installation just like a DRAC can do.