It might seem that the obvious answer to my desire for remotecontrollable DVD drives is to netboot my machines.Unfortunately it's not a good answer.

Booting a machine is only a tiny sliver of the problem; the real problemis (re)installing and testing machines. While a lot of operating systemshave some sort of a network install system, there are three coreproblems with netinstall setups: they are almost always second classcitizens (partly because they are usually used much less), they takeextra work

With remoteable KVMs and power outlets that can be remote controlled,there is only one important missing bit until I can give up visitingmachine rooms almost entirely: a remote-controllable DVD drive.

The easiest way to do this would be with a USB device that pretended tobe a DVD ROM drive, but was actually a big pool of disk space with ISOimages. You'd give it an Ethernet connection so you could control itremotely to 'switch' the 'discs' and so on.

(Since Linux

Coming from an environment where we just put everything on shelves in racks , I have to say thatproper rack mounting is kind of neat, but rack rails irritate me. It'sall because of one simple little problem:

Why, oh why, can't people agree on a single sort of rails?

(Or at least a single sort of rails for things of each rack unit , so you'd have 1U rails and 2Urails and 3U rails and so on.)

We have