Currently, I have SSH, VNC, and Cockpit setup on my home NAS, but I have run into situations where I lose remote access because I did something stupid to the network connection or some update broke the boot process, causing it to get stuck in the BIOS or bootloader.
I am looking for a separate device that will allow me to not only access the NAS as if I had another keyboard, mouse, and monitor present, but also let’s me power cycle in the case of extreme situations (hard freeze, etc.). Some googling has turned up the term KVM-over-IP, but I was wondering if any of you guys have any trustworthy recommendations.
Lantronix has a product called Spider, which (several years ago when I used one) works wonders. To the host side it looks like a standard monitor, keyboard, mouse and usb. I’m not quite sure if they still actively develop that, but at least the product page is still available. It’s not cheap, so it might not be what you’re looking for, but I was impressed on what it can do (since the company I worked back then too care of the invoice). It can’t do power cycle or hit reset button, but beyond that it was pretty close to IPMI and other remote server management solutions.
With my own wallet I’d look for piKVM, but it’s not really cheap either and I don’t have any personal experience with it. For power cycle there’s a ton of companies who manufacure wall-warts which you can control over wifi, APC and other big players included, and for home gamers nodeMCU and shelly are solid options if you’re familiar with electronics, but they can’t do KVM over IP, so it might require using different products to remotely accessing the host and for power management.
Thanks! The piKVM does look very interesting, and its open source nature gives me more piece of mind too.