IPMI EVERYWHERE! w/The Pi-KVM

this video is brought to you by asrock and the new b550 phantom gaming riptide it is a more budget-friendly board but it has some pretty high-end features it's a pretty good mix so you get a primary x16 slot that runs a pci express 4.0 and then two physical x16 slots that are through the chipset so those are pci express 3.0 but that gives you a good mix a good ability to run high-end expansion cards things like that we've got a 10 power phase design dr moss driver plus mosfet yeah that's a that's a thing this is more than capable enough to drive the 5950x but it'll also work well with those new apus like the 4000 and 5000 series processors that have the built-in vega so at the back you've got a ton of usb connectivity look at all that usb connectivity one usb type-c and two usb ports that are optimized for the new like over 1 000 hertz usb polling devices this is of course the b550 chipset and it supports memory up to ddr4 4933 it's got the killer e3100 nick that's a 2.5 gig nick 7.1 channel audio based around the realtek alc 897 audio codec also in the box is the gpu support so yeah these motherboards have the components arranged so you can use an included metal bracket as a support for the far end of your graphics card which is pretty awesome so it's a pretty good balance of of features and value so if you're looking at doing amd for your next build you should give this board a look thanks asrock and on with the video on today's episode of mystery piece theater there's a pile of electronics in front of me and we really need to take a look at this because this is something everybody's home lab needs this is great all right so spoiler alert this is the third or fourth time that i have completely disassembled and reassembled this thing this is my new toy this is the pi kvm from pikvm.org go to their website and read along while i tell you about it so this is the full enchilada this is like the maximum accessory kit it comes with the pi kvm hat and a ribbon cable for the raspberry pi 4 although there's also a ribbon cable for the raspberry pi zero if you want to try to do this with a raspberry pi zero you can recommend the raspberry pi 4 personally does not come with the raspberry pi 4 or the storage card the sd card but that's all you really need with this setup actually you could boot it off the uh the network because the raspberry pi 4 supports that we're not going to do that this is remote control for a computer and remote power on in a hat so you can add out of band management to any computer so if you're doing like the home lab home server thing because you get that cool you know ryzen 1700 which you can now get on ebay for practically nothing and you want an a core home server but you're running it off of a cheap motherboard and you would like to be able to remote into the computer and change the bios settings remotely this is the thing that will do that for you but before we get to that there's some accessories the other thing that you also get is like wait a minute you can turn it on and off remotely how do you do that you'd have to plug into the the front panel of the thing well that's what this is for this is rj45 it looks like this is a network connection but this is actually just an eight wire thing that goes to this thing so right here everything on this side of the device is basically for interfacing to your computer so hdmi usb c those are for your keyboard and mouse emulation and then your uh you know rj45 connection which is not network it's for this which would live inside your computer this is a breakout board where your front panel connections so basically you plug your front panel connections into this and you plug this into your motherboard so your reset button and your power switch and all that inside your computer still works as normal it's just that this little breakout board lets you also pass control of power and reset to this little thing which you can control you know remotely because it's a whole other computer it's the whole computer within a computer out of band management this is what that a speed 2500 is that i keep going on about in servers except now you can diy and it's not an hp 2500 it's actually better and more elaborately complex than an asp 2500 which is mind-boggling but i digress also in the box you get a really cool you know this is a powder-coated serious metal enclosure i'm glad they went this way instead of a 3d printed type thing it is definitely a nice accessory it's definitely high-end also comes with a little fan i've sort of pre-installed the fan to save you some time on assembly but when you put it together you know that's basically what you get for the assembly it's really awesome they also include all the screws and everything that you need to get everything going include this little cable with some connections here i think this is the in programmer that is associated with this this is an optional dual usbc connection with a usb type a connector so this will actually bolt on here and give you two more usb type-c connections that could potentially connect to the computer that you want to control the reason this exists is for devices that are problematic with usb emulation so this connection here is a usb on the go connection to the raspberry pi the raspberry pi the broadcom controller basically has usb on the go built in so you don't really need to do anything special for that you can use the usb on the go interface in the raspberry pi to emulate peripherals serial devices keyboard mice works great on almost everything but some people might be using this with really old or crappy servers or machines that have a really buggy bios so this is a true hid human interface device interface board based around the atmel avr so there's a second programmable microcontroller on this that provides a usbc interface for keyboards and mice some really crappy kvms not the level one kvm want explicit keyboard and mouse ports this will give you explicit keyboard and mouse ports for those really crappy kvms so you could chain this to a non-ipk vm and effectively have an ipk vm you don't need this with the level 1k vms it works fine with the usb on the go interface which is awesome this interface also gives you a usb type a on the side so with the usb type a the idea here is that you could plug in like a 256 gig flash drive and if that flash drive has isos operating system installation images other stuff that you might need for imaging you can just use that with the raspberry pi kvm and it can actually emulate a cd-rom for your host device so if you've got a windows iso this thing will pretend to be the cd-rom to the host computer and you can boot off of it and install windows completely remotely it's pretty cool stuff i would say that most people do not need this i mean go ahead and get this if you want to support the project and and be assured for maximum compatibility you actually do some of the uh the device emulation stuff without this but to be sure it does work dramatically way better if you do have this so use it if you can if you need to get really extra special creative there is even a ps2 breakout header so you could support ps2 devices natively and not through emulation with this header as well so i feel like the uh the implementers here have got you covered no matter what sort of insane device you might need in terms of uh you know interface and all that kind of thing and this also has the the micro header for that you know usb breakout in case you need to run back here and connect to you know another usb port or whatever to reprogram this is totally an option most people won't need this this is really cool this is the pi kvm oled screen so it's just a four pin connection serial peripheral connection you just plug it in here it's got its little carrier 3d printed thing it lives inside the case and this little status screen will show you the ip address and some other things which is really cool don't freak out if when you plug this in it doesn't work immediately when you flash the image onto the sd card we'll get to that there's some configuration steps you need to take to enable this and this and the fan uh depending on you know what set of accessories you have so it doesn't auto detect them you have to go in and do a little bit of configuration but it's fine it's totally fine also in the box is this you know rainbow colored cable this is all of the cabling that you could possibly need for connecting your front panel connections to this and then managing the front panel connections from this to your actual front panel wires so that's cool it comes with half height as well as full height brackets which will cover whatever your expansion slot needs are typically you see these half height slots and servers so if you have a server that doesn't have full height expansion slots sometimes small form factor desktops but most people will be using the full height bracket which is really really awesome and we have a usbc bridge so this will bridge power to your raspberry pi so this is this will take power from the breakout board and send it to the raspberry pi which is awesome and then we have some 3d printed accessories and screws so these are the standoffs that go in the bottom well let me show you how to assemble this it's really easy so first i would suggest that you start with the standoffs well put your raspberry pi together like this and then connect this ribbon cable you have to pop the latch up and then slide the ribbon cable in and then push the latch down on both sides it might actually be easier to put the cable in the raspberry pi first and then feed it through the slot in the printed circuit board and then put it in here because you have these little like don't yank on this flat ribbon cable you have to latch and unlatch it if you yank on it you're gonna damage the contacts so don't do that so just sort of grab the sides of the the connector there and the cable just pops right in and right out if you've got it in all the way you should not be able to see any metal pins so look for that should just be white plastic that you see and it comes wrapped in foil which reduces on electromagnetic interference otherwise you'll get lines and weird stuff like that in your uh in your hdmi display so once you've got this assembled you just need to put these little standoffs on the bottom here somewhere they've got one other extra standoff that's this one and that is meant to go on top of your you know this thing so install that make sure the usb-c ports line up and then this is going to go right like that now the pi kvm hat you can see it has a little tiny battery soldered on it that's for the built-in real-time clock because the raspberry pi doesn't have a built-in real-time clock but now it does don't forget to connect your usb-c power accessory on the side so that your pi kvm can get power and the fan is going to sit right here so the power for the fan is located on this header and it is labeled plus and minus red is plus so you want to connect that header make sure that's in good make sure that your fan cable is nice and out of the way and that's pretty much it aside from i need to put in some more screws and make it a little bit better but this gives you your front panel connections a serial console you've got your your usb on the go interface but then you also have your usb mouse and keyboard and usb type a interface if you really need it for accessories the hdmi the micro hdmi is still accessible so you can plug that in and get a console in your raspberry pi if you need to troubleshoot it of course the type 3 and type 2 are the usb 3 and usb 2 interfaces are still available your regular ethernet interface is unchanged you know serial console and then you've got your usb c power and link uh if you need to do other stuff and you've got a red and green light here you know minimally you've got the red and green light but you also have the optional oled screen so if you get all the accessories and accoutrement the website says it's going to be about 130 give or take plus shipping and handling and some other fees i'm sure but 150 dollars for this you know an a10 ipkvm is like 500 plus so this is a pretty good deal for what it is and the fact that you can remotely turn on a machine so let's take a look at the software now the software for this is open source and technically you don't even need to buy any of these hats so the reason this thing is sort of catching on is because the usb console interfaces have gotten super super cheap and so you can plug this thing in you can basically plug a usb capture card into your raspberry pi and get a remote interface and then somebody said well wait the raspberry pi can emulate a keyboard and this thing just sort of snowballed from there well the software developer behind this you know brilliant guy put a lot of work into this it seems and the software is really what makes this the software is more polished than an ipk vm that you would have from like hp or dell or supermicro or gigabyte or anybody you know even the asp 2500 the web interface supports motion jpeg as well as h.265 streaming but you can also customize the interface out of the box you got to do some initial setup and configuration ssh into the machine first and set the root password the root password is different than the web interface password when you first log in you're greeted with these helpful messages so even if you're a total noob you're not going to have any problems set the password now that's setting the password for the operating system the raspberry pi is a linux machine it's very powerful people could totally be binding you know monero or bitcoin or anything on that and you don't want that so you want to set a secure root password when you log in it also tells you that you can run a command to set the admin password for the web interface go ahead and do that those passwords should not be the same they should be different the next thing is because we've got these accessories we want to run a couple of commands to enable the oled screen it's a systemd service system d who knew you just run this and enable a service and your oled screen will come right up you don't even have to restart same with the fan control without the service the fan runs at 100 but with the service the fan is going to run you know depending on what the pi kvm actually needs it's a lot less audible when you're you know in control because when it's running 100 you can definitely hear it if you need to do further customizations well there's yaml files and there's good documentation there's actually some example recipes in the cookbook for this on their github where you can daisy chain some commands or serial control because you've got those console ports for like a serial kvm to be able to to do whatever because the level one tax kvm supports usb 1.1 you know hid emulation you can just send the keystrokes you know through this to a level one kvm and switch inputs from one to four and that works reasonably well provided you've got the the extra atmel hit accessory in the top i love the fact that this is open source and you see on their website there's references to like the v2 or you know other versions you don't have to buy the hat to use this you could you know diy it but it's just so convenient and so relatively inexpensive that for me it's worth paying 100 bucks for the convenience of of just you know plug this in flash an image do some configuration the sd card slot is still accessible and then i have this this magical little black box that's going to give me remote access even to the bios now the system that we're testing here that is a evga 3175x you know it's a really high-end 28 core intel xeon it's it's a banana system but it doesn't provide any out of band or remote management but now it does i can turn it on remotely i can reset it remotely i can long hold on the power remotely in case it's hung or has some other problem and everything works really well now this machine has native hdmi that's no problem i know what you're thinking a lot of servers and other stuff that maybe don't have out of band those still have vga i've got good news for you i've got a usb powered vga to hdmi adapter this thing supports up to 1920x1080p input of course it defaults to 720p but i've got my vga to hdmi adapter and yes i can use vga input with this thing it's usb powered i can power it right off the usb 2 input on the uh on the kvm and it works great i decided to take out the uh the what's up pro to see how many watts this thing uses when i've got a remote session going under normal usage scenarios so i got this usb battery bank from keoksia i got that plugged in four and a half watts this thing will run for like an hour in the no power scenario so that if something's down i can remote in and be like oh the server doesn't even have power the uh you know the pi kvm is still going strong what is it what is it they say in the security thing in this in the security uh security world red teaming if you're if you're red teaming one of these and a battery pack could be a fun nifty device huh uh yeah i just throw it up in a ceiling somewhere and you're good to go of course that was probably true with the regular raspberry pi without the kvm component of it either but i digress so bottom line everything that i thought that i would suggest to improve on this device has already been incorporated into the device's feedback if you actually crawl to github and the forum and some of the other stuff a lot of it has been documented all of the common complaints that all of like the the upper echelon system administrators might have somebody has already thought of and because it's open source they're building it into this this is already better than a commercial solution in a lot of ways of course with great flexibility comes great responsibility you're gonna have to make sure that this is secure and locked down and the bad guys aren't living inside your your kvm if you're going to deploy these on a 24 7 you know kind of a scenario but if you're you know having to do something on site and you just need a quick plug and play thing this could be in your tool bag you can whip this out and plug it into whatever device is being problematic and it can be your remote you know uh hands if you're in a scenario where you've got a lot of remote offices and here you're just one guy having to support a bunch of offices and you got to walk people through stuff over the phone deploy this to all of your remote offices and just have them plug the computer into that it's gonna make everybody's life easier and it'll be way easier for you to deal with it because you can literally unplug it plug it in deal with it you can just equip every computer with one of these breakout cables and be able to turn it on or off remotely or just you know telephone the guy that's there and be like all right reset it now all right press and hold power all right good i'm good to go this is basically the final production version there's been a couple of other versions that have floated around youtube this is such a good product i'm ordering two more immediately and i'll probably order a lot more than that over the next year just to you know the friends and family discounts like yeah okay grandma yep yep just get the black box out and just shove it into your computer or maybe i'll just leave it plugged in all the time and be good to go there the only thing this doesn't have is pass-through so when you plug in with hdmi you know there's there's nothing else for that but you can combine that with the level one text kvm and have displayport pass through to hdmi and that all works really well of course this device is limited to 1080p so you gotta know what the limitations are but it does work really well and while this is level one this is an amazing device even if you don't plan to buy one of these you should check out their website and just be aware that it exists because it is so cool all right i'm signing out and you can find me in the level one forums come with questions or pictures of your setup by kvm.org link below check it out

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 52,966

Rating: 4.9349699 out of 5

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: LwsznhIBPMc

Length: 19min 30sec (1170 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Flukemaster]

This is amazing!

I went to buy one immediately after this video but it's all sold out.

[u/BrideOfAutobahn]

shout out to /r/pikvm

[u/BillyDSquillions]

Sorry, it's a 20 minute video, will this let you power the system on and off too though?...

[u/raptordavis]

Using an rpi4b for this seems completely unnecessary.