If someone is doing this, especially wrt to 1U servers, perhaps someone could provide a pointer to a reboot solution that would allow a single reboot device to control 42+ 1Us in a single rack. From my occasional interest in this area, I've seen lots of reboot solutions. Most of them take as many as 4-10 U to reboot 40 machines, which sort of obviates the need to reboot 40 machines in a single rack in the first place. Unless you use 10ft racks, I guess.

IMHO the right way to do this is to build the power cycling capability into the individual 1U boxen. Again, we should be talking to the embedded systems folks to give them a standard set of requirements that everyone can support. This may be worth having a workshop discussion at a NANOG meeting to define requirements. I envisage a standard control module with two external serial ports. One serial port is for a daisy-chained serial bus that can allow one control module to talk to other boxen. The other serial port is where the modem connection goes and could probably be designed to take either an RJ11 phone cable or an RJ45 serial terminal cable. The 1U box's power supply has a built-in relay that is switched by the control module. All external switches and indicators go through the control module. --Michael Dillon