Headless servers

L

lone wolf

Gawd
Joined
Feb 4, 2003
Messages
705
Just curious how many out there have headless servers running? I went to a new client today who has his server running headless, he just remotes into it. It struck me kinda odd that he would be doing it this way, then I found out why. He does video productions of "adult type" material. Not for me to judge...:rolleyes:
 
My file server at home is headless. Practically every server at my work is technically headless as they are only connected to a rack KVM, and are administrated remotely. Its not always convenient to walk to the physical server, especially when I have to do something to them and I am at home.
 
All of our servers at work are headless, as are my home ones.
 
Both of my servers are headless and I use Remote Desktop to access them.

I do have a console at the ready though as my fileserver has a raid card that likes dos configuration :p
 
Pretty much all of are servers have monitors, keyboards, and mice attached to them. Thing is we deal with small business that have in most cases 1 or 2 boxes so it is easy to do.

Most of my friends that work in bigger enviroments have management cards in the servers which can act like a kvm over ip.

Thing is it is too easy to throw a monitor on a machine to leave it headless. Pick up a LCD for 200 bucks and throw a cheap keyboard and mouse on it. A good amount of our clients will remote into their servers from their own machine though.
 
Grentz said:
Both of my servers are headless and I use Remote Desktop to access them.
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I always thought that headless meant no GUI interface.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headless

I think by nature Windows is not headless (Can this be done?).

I run Debian on all of my servers (by default it installs without X), and use SSH to administer them. Most of them only have a network cable and a power cable connected to them!
 
99% of the work servers are headless, those that have a monitor and the rest are normally part of a KVM solution in the datacenter.

At home, both of the servers are technically headless accessed via ssh or rdp (/console).
 
cburwell said:
I always thought that headless meant no GUI interface.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headless

I think by nature Windows is not headless (Can this be done?).

I run Debian on all of my servers (by default it installs without X), and use SSH to administer them. Most of them only have a network cable and a power cable connected to them!
Click to expand...

Back in the good ole days of Unix, yes this meant headless, but in today's IT world Headless means no keyboard-mouse-monitor.
I also run my servers here at home "headless". I do have a monitor that in case of severe crashes I can connect.
 
I guess I was just looking it from a resource usage perspective, No GUI generally equals less resources used.

Not having a keyboard, monitor, and mouse connected to a server does not seem like it will save much in the age of KVMs, and the ability to "hotswap" USB keyboards/mice. That's just my opinion though.
 
cburwell said:
I guess I was just looking it from a resource usage perspective, No GUI generally equals less resources used.

Not having a keyboard, monitor, and mouse connected to a server does not seem like it will save much in the age of KVMs, and the ability to "hotswap" USB keyboards/mice. That's just my opinion though.
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The next version of windows server comming out this year will support command line only installs. Big thing with running servers headless now isn't running them without a gui but more not dealing with the extra cables for kvms(this gets to be a shit load of cables when you are taking about a few racks of servers). Also you are looking at a pretty good cost reduction by not buying those kvms. Another big thing is with the remote managment cards in many new servers it is not needed. The cards run there own system and can act as an ip based kvm and can also monitor hardware and preform reboots which is nice if a server crashes and your not onsite. Also while yes you can "hotswap" a keyboard and mouse would you want to? If you are dealing with a rack or racks you would also need to hang a monitor somewhere.
 
My home server is an old laptop with the lid closed unless I can't RDP to it. How that for headless.
 
at home I have 3 hooked up to a KVM and one that has a monitor but I don't use it. At work all of our servers are headless (Dedicated hosting company), the only time we connect a keyboard and monitor is initial install and if something gets fucked up.
 
I have 2 servers at home that are headless, RDP from my wireless laptop is fine and as neither have ever crashed its just as easy as having them with a monitor. (I do have 1 handy if there was ever a need though)
 
lone wolf said:
It struck me kinda odd that he would be doing it this way, then I found out why. He does video productions of "adult type" material. Not for me to judge...:rolleyes:
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does his win2k3 server screen saver automatically change to an adult theme if the file server has adult material on it? that's really irrelevant to the topic at hand, but it's good to see you passing judgement in a tech thread.

i don't mean to flame, but i just get tired of people relentlessly (in forums and conversation) introducing small tidbits of entirely irrelevant data in a story simply to display of their disproval and bias.
 
All servers at work are headless, and my linux box at home is headless. No kvm, just ssh.
 
headless ftw

all my personal ones are headless
all the real servers are running cli only
all the virtual boxes are cli for *nix or gui for windows
 
iroc409 said:
does his win2k3 server screen saver automatically change to an adult theme if the file server has adult material on it? that's really irrelevant to the topic at hand, but it's good to see you passing judgement in a tech thread.

i don't mean to flame, but i just get tired of people relentlessly (in forums and conversation) introducing small tidbits of entirely irrelevant data in a story simply to display of their disproval and bias.
Click to expand...

While I appreciate your comments, the comment "not for me to judge" means that I am not judging this client, I didn't understand something until I found the reason. I'm sure that you get tired of seeing and hearing it, we all do. If I didn't approve I would have passed the business to another consultant, but I have seen worse and probally will again. This is the nature of this business, we may see or hear something that we don't approve of, but the people that have been in this business for some time now understand that this is going to happen, and there is nothing that we can do to stop it. If I don't like what I see, the best thing for me to do is get out of the business, and since I have been doing this for over 25 years now, I'm pretty happy at what I am doing.
 
cburwell said:
I always thought that headless meant no GUI interface.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headless

I think by nature Windows is not headless (Can this be done?).

I run Debian on all of my servers (by default it installs without X), and use SSH to administer them. Most of them only have a network cable and a power cable connected to them!
Click to expand...

Same here. Running 2 Debian Linux, one OpenBSD and one NetBSD, and all have just network cables and power cords, no keyboards, video, mice
 
lone wolf said:
While I appreciate your comments, the comment "not for me to judge" means that I am not judging this client, I didn't understand something until I found the reason. I'm sure that you get tired of seeing and hearing it, we all do. If I didn't approve I would have passed the business to another consultant, but I have seen worse and probally will again. This is the nature of this business, we may see or hear something that we don't approve of, but the people that have been in this business for some time now understand that this is going to happen, and there is nothing that we can do to stop it. If I don't like what I see, the best thing for me to do is get out of the business, and since I have been doing this for over 25 years now, I'm pretty happy at what I am doing.
Click to expand...

my apologies if i misread your post, it just sounded like what i usually read/hear.
 
To add to the ongoing theme...

At work, we have 6 racks, all headless (although they all are on some form of KVM). However, we only use the KVM when either installing systems (I know, old fashioned - we're moving to an automated system this summer) or fixing serious problems (which is practically never, knock on wood). We technically have one new server thats an old-fashioned headless box too - a AMD-based Sun server, running Solaris, which doesn't even have a video card in it.

My single server at home is headless too. It nice, as I can just power it off, move it around, and plug in power and ethernet, and I'm back up and running.
 
i used to run my server headless... now its also my media center though... so i just run it with a small LCD and a remote control... everything else i do i can either use synergy or some sort of vnc... i work a lot with RDP on windows as well, but there are some limitations to that interface

but i have a few clients that i've set up headless servers for them... but truthfully i've quit doing that... seems to overcomplicate things for the client... a lot of times i think they would just rather spend the money to have a monitor and a keyboard and mouse on thier little file server so that when they try to get to thier mapped drives on thier desktops and they can't.... they can go "log into the server", also makes it easier for them to do backups

just makes it seem more like another computer to them...

especially when i've configured a server for them out of an old workstation box that may be gradually losing its stability...

many oem PSUs aren't suited for such tasks
 
All our work servers are headless. I just use an Avocent to go between them.
 
At home, I have 2 servers running headless and I'm using VNC for the media server (windows xp box) and SSH for the Endian firewall if the web management isn't enough.
 
My server is connected to the VGA port on the 2000FP, but I use RDP almost exclusively if I need to work with it (winamp and utorrent).

And Im not sure how adult material company has anything to do with headless or not.
 
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