[rescue] Remote System Control on E250

[Robert Rose]

At 01:56 AM 26/02/2003 -0600, Lionel wrote:
>I am starting to get serious about my E250, and couldn't help but
>notice that the hardware includes a Remote System Control interface,
>allowing secure Ethernet/serial console connections - has anyone used
>this?

Yep, loads of experience, deployed 25 x E250's across Australia with RSC 
enabled for a government client.

>I am intrigued by this, and want to learn more - I've scanned the
>documents at http://docs.sun.com/db/coll/935.1 and it seems to make
>clear that the software is shipped on a CD-ROM, independednt of an OS
>media kit - is this correct?

The software is freely available either in Solaris or as a 
download.  SUNWrsc* I think was the packages under Solaris 2.6, may well be 
included with 7 and above, but perhaps on a seperate CD.  Easily obtainable 
anyway on the E250 side, the client is a java GUI (has a nice image of the 
E250 front panel including keyswitch! ), but you can manage it with telnet 
if you prefer.  GUI seems more stable on Solaris, but the windoze version 
is useable.

>Is this generally available (assuming it is not included in Solaris 9
>distro), and does anyone have any opinions on using this?

It works very well, later incarnations of this are the sun 
Lights-Out-Management (LOM) on the Netras is similar but not ethernet 
enabled.  The nice thing is that the RSC MAC address = E250 MAC address +1, 
so you can plug both into the same switch without any hassles.

Initial configuration is a bit of a pain, read the scripts in 
/usr/platform/SUNW,Ultra-250/sbin to see what the RSC configuration does, 
it's easy to hack up for inclusion in a Jumpstart postinstall script.

If you do screw things up, keep a type 5 or 6 keyboard handy to stop+N the 
box.  Part of the install is to set the input-device and output-device at 
the prom to "rsc".  Apart from that, it's pretty neat.

Rob.