Show HN: TinyPilot – Build a KVM over IP using a Raspberry Pi

Fantastic project. Amazing how you overcame each obstacle, and very well written to boot. Kudos.

Quite funny how you brought 1000 ms latency down to 200 ms. I wonder how this compares to iDRAC and that Raritan device.

Thanks for reading!

Yeah, it was kind of like the perfect difficulty level for this kind of project. If it was two months of work to get it working at all, I probably would have gotten discouraged, but it worked out that every couple weeks I was rewarded with a breakthrough that substantially improved the latency until it was finally a practical tool.

I don’t know about iDRAC but I used raritan a bit for some home projects and it’s not super fun. I couldn’t connect it on HDMI when the server was already running, it had to be connected before the boot. For both VGA and HDMI, it sort of works, there is a clunky but functional java desktop application, the screen is often off by a dozen pixels (part of the screen hidden) and the pointer too.

For new servers, I just buy a supermicro motherboard with IPMI and stop worrying. You can set up an IP based firewall within IPMI, so that only a handful of IPs can even connect, plus a very strong password, and I am not too worried about exposing it to the WAN (I know it’s not a great idea but I don’t know any alternative that doesn’t require another U in a datacentre)..

I've used virtually all of the iDRACs. They're probably in that 200ms area (based on my gut feeling w/ no empirical measurements). They've been fairly responsive in my experience.

I manage a machine that has an AST2500 (competitor to iDRAC in smaller vendors like Gigabyte, it rocks), and I didn't notice latency, so it's probably under 200ms.

Most iDRAC type products actually use that same Aspeed ASTxxxx with vendor firmwares. If a server reports "Matrox G200e" as display adapter it's it.

Out of curiosity do they bring any functionality that this device does not?

The most interesting stuff is generally:

-Remotely mounting images (ISO/FS/IMG/etc) on the host for bare-metal installs or any other purpose

-Hard power options for unresponsive servers or emergencies

-Heavily integrated diagnostics (fan RPMs, thermals, RAID status, etc etc) with eg. snmp output

It can one-click update all firmware for bios, network cards, storage controller etc

Cool, I assume with enough willpower those first two could be solved with a pi too ;)

If we go that route, all three of them could (for example via fan sensors). Whether it's worth it is a different question :)

> -Remotely mounting images (ISO/FS/IMG/etc) on the host for bare-metal installs or any other purpose

For what it's worth, that stuff has always been incredibly unreliable for me. Enough so that old school PXE booting was the only way to maintain a server pool, couldn't get them to consistently reimage through the proprietary stuff.

The remote power control is very nice, and I didn't see anything on this page about that. (Though now I'm just imagining the "useless PC" [1] that just tells a smart power plug to turn itself off.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine

I never had a single issue with it if I mounted it from an onsite drive. Mounting from home in my den is a bit more iffy and pretty slow. PXE is definitely better, but the iso method is nice for when that's not an option.

I use a RPi to control smart home components including wifi controlled smart plugs. You could use one as a hard power off, and WoL as a soft power on.