Yeah tinypilot looks nice but they want money for every little thing even when you self-build. Seriously who doesn't want password authentication on their KVM? This is just a base requirement IMO.
For an out of the box product maybe but when I chose to self build its at least in part to avoid costs. And for €350 a port you can buy a real AAA-brand KVM not to mention the yearly charge ($80) that most KVMs don't have.
I wonder how many people spend this much money on it. But perhaps I'm not the target audience. I want KVMs for my home lab and $350 is something I'd spend on a full server, not a peripheral. But perhaps this is also a sign of standards of living in the US and Europe diverging. When I hear of senior devs making $250k per year when here they would make $50k, it's a big difference that will obviously make $350 a lot less expensive.
But I would imagine that once you get into real businesses with money they would prefer real AAA-brand boxes and not a raspberry pi with a custom HAT in a 3D printed box :)
I did buy a CSI board to try out pikvm. Hope it works well.
I've got two TinyPilots - one I built using the linked instructions and I bought a TinyPilot Pro because, while pricey, I wanted to support a project that has made my life a lot easier.
I had once misconfigured the network adapter of a dedicated server and it lost internet connection.
VKVM came to the rescue, it's an ISO file that has Linux based OS.
It automaticaly boots your primary OS in a VM and has a web dashboard where you can see the screen and control the server.
For one thing a lot of BMCs are not the easiest to secure and at least KVM devices like a Spider or PiKVM can be patched so that these network accessible devices aren’t so easy to own remotely. A number of BMCs can start advertising and routing to itself across different PHY so even not hooking up the management NIC to a separate LAN won’t be enough then (you’d need to have the right settings and hope you can disable this behavior to avoid such a broadcast across other NICs). I have this issue with my ASRock ASpeed BMC and never got around to fixing it but it bothers me a bit every time I see the IP pop up in my DHCP list and ARP tables.
BMCs can also be patched. HP updates iLO regularly. I even got a major update on my servers adding things like HTML5 consoles (previously it only had .NET and Java which is a pain in this day and age)
And this is for a server I paid $150 for after cashback from HP.
Oh yes, BMCs can certainly be patched but I had the security issue long after the last patch for the motherboard was released so it really comes down to the manufacturer support level as usual. HP likely does better than Supermicro which likely does better than ASRock
TinyPilot is open-nothing. Good head-to-head review here: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/raspberry-pi-kvms-com...