Its an useless CompaQ card with lots of things on it.

http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/pu … p4ts.oid=397204

It's a Remote Insight Lights-Out Edition II card. It's an out-of-band management (aka 'full remote access over network, including bios and everything else') card that allows powering on/off a server. It's even independently powered when the server is off.

Stojke wrote:

Its an useless CompaQ card with lots of things on it.

🤣

Maeslin wrote:

http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/pu … p4ts.oid=397204

It's a Remote Insight Lights-Out Edition II card. It's an out-of-band management (aka 'full remote access over network, including bios and everything else') card that allows powering on/off a server. It's even independently powered when the server is off.

Wow, absolutely the same image and everything. Awesome find/connection there! So the video output is to handle video display at the server locally? And the rest of it is to handle the out of band management? Is it basically a single board computer of sorts then?

Somewhat like a special-purpose PowerPC single board computer yeah. The video output is because the card also works as a video card. Probably digitizes the video signal to send over the LAN and works as a 'fake' keyboard/mouse for the server.

Maeslin wrote:

http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/pu … p4ts.oid=397204

It's a Remote Insight Lights-Out Edition II card. It's an out-of-band management (aka 'full remote access over network, including bios and everything else') card that allows powering on/off a server. It's even independently powered when the server is off.

Point of order: Out-of-band management means you can administer the device outside "in-band". Kind of like the big Multilayer switch chassis's and aggregators. If there's a, lets say 40GigE interface line card feeding multiple 10GigE cards, and multiple SHSDL/VDSL+ cards, you won't use ANY of their bandwidth administering the device. Out-of-Band is an extra "lane" expressly for management tasks only.

The Remote Lights-out card sounds more like an AUX vty line.

/Nerd mode: off

So...in basic terms this card allows one to remotely power on a computer/server and remotely control it from someplace else and presumably alter/transfer files?

With the PowerPC I was originally going to guess some kind of crazy Macintosh on a PCI card for running PPC software on PC's, after all early Macs had those (Orange 486 and early pentiums I think) so I suppose it isn't farfetched to assume it could happen the other way around.

zstandig wrote:

So...in basic terms this card allows one to remotely power on a computer/server and remotely control it from someplace else and presumably alter/transfer files?

With the PowerPC I was originally going to guess some kind of crazy Macintosh on a PCI card for running PPC software on PC's, after all early Macs had those (Orange 486 and early pentiums I think) so I suppose it isn't farfetched to assume it could happen the other way around.

That was kind of my first thought. Like the 040 accelerator boards for Amigas, I thought some of the pre-PowerPC macs had an accelerator board as an option.

I vaguely remember reading the specs and performance reviews of the Orange 486. I think it did Okayish. Wasn't the bus (Nubus?) the limiting factor on that one?

HI

I have a more modern (integrated) version of this on my server.

You can access it via TCP/IP, whereupon you may have a remote
console like VNC or a virtual serial connection.

It has quite a few features which include system diagnostics. I
can show other screen shots if anyone is really that interested.

To be honest, I don't use it and have it off line because I don't
know enough about it but it was used to provision the machine.

bye

sklawz wrote:

HI […]
Show full quote

HI

I have a more modern (integrated) version of this on my server.

You can access it via TCP/IP, whereupon you may have a remote
console like VNC or a virtual serial connection.

out.jpg

It has quite a few features which include system diagnostics. I
can show other screen shots if anyone is really that interested.

To be honest, I don't use it and have it off line because I don't
know enough about it but it was used to provision the machine.

bye

Sounds like a fancier version of what we did to access a network rack, in the event of a trunk failure.

A cheap dial-up modem (on a completely separate phone system from the facility) that would connect to the AUX port on a router that had an octal cable (8 RJ-45 jacks). Dial the access router, then you can ssh in to all the routers the octal cable is connected to. Anything you could do in person, you could do remotely.

And I think there was even a power-reset device you could ping, and remote power cycle equipment easily.

ElectricMonk wrote:

zstandig wrote:

So...in basic terms this card allows one to remotely power on a computer/server and remotely control it from someplace else and presumably alter/transfer files?

With the PowerPC I was originally going to guess some kind of crazy Macintosh on a PCI card for running PPC software on PC's, after all early Macs had those (Orange 486 and early pentiums I think) so I suppose it isn't farfetched to assume it could happen the other way around.

That was kind of my first thought. Like the 040 accelerator boards for Amigas, I thought some of the pre-PowerPC macs had an accelerator board as an option.

I vaguely remember reading the specs and performance reviews of the Orange 486. I think it did Okayish. Wasn't the bus (Nubus?) the limiting factor on that one?

I think so, I never owned a mac new, only reason I have an old snow imac is because I found it, but its too new for any kind of processor add on stuff because Jobs went with his OCD kookoo bananas routine and made it so it can barely be updated and has zero legacy ports (and really who, in 2001, needed a webcam, easy to use video chat software didn't exist yet and dial up was too slow?). From what I read the orange and others generally performed just well enough to do whatever it was that a mac user would want a pc to do. Judging by the price of both together it just blows my mind that anyone would pay for a mac than pay for essentially a single board PC instead of just getting the PC...whatever. Must have been for people that splurged for a Mac then finally got a job and realized that most businesses used PCs, than frantically looked for a way to run wordstar or was too impatient to wait for the mac version of some game.