Hello everyone,
I’m Eddie, currently serving as a service evangelist at Allxon. To keep things concise and avoid sounding too salesy, I’ll sum up what we do in one sentence: We provide solutions for remotely managing NVIDIA Jetson devices via Out-Of-Band technology.
Last month, we developed a solution for remotely controlling NVIDIA Jetson devices via serial console, allowing users to control devices from afar and troubleshoot as needed.
At GTC2024 two weeks ago, we showcased this new feature and received positive feedback from the Jetson community. However, we’re hoping to gather more feedback from Jetson developers on how they’re using the feature and how we can improve it. I’ve seen many talented developers sharing innovative Jetson projects here, so I’m reaching out to seek your input. With insights from Jetson experts like yourselves, we can refine this feature further.
The story behind this feature started last year when we noticed many major companies using serial consoles for remote troubleshooting, such as Azure, AWS, and Google. This sparked the idea of implementing similar functionality on NVIDIA Jetson devices.
Since Jetson devices come with serial console ports, we connected the UART interface from our existing Out-Of-Band module to these ports. Below is an illustration of how it’s connected to the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano dev kit.
We send commands via our Cloud-based Portal to the agent installed on the out-of-band moduleJetson device, opening the terminal on the edge side. Users can then input commands via the UI on the Portal, which are transmitted to the OOB module as strings and sent to the edge device via UART to be executed on the terminal, enabling device control. Here’s a simplified flowchart:
The advantages this feature offers users include:
Unlike software based remote terminal access, our solution via serial console eliminates the need to set up SSH services or configure exposefixed IPs and serviceLAN ports on the device, thus enhancing information security.
Thanks to the independent network of Out-Of-Band, device control is still possible even when there’s no the network connectivity ofon the edge device becomes unreachable somehow.
By taking all the advantages provide byThrough the serial console (debug UART) interface, users can see more low level system information including boot logs which can be viewd for toubleshooting abnormal bootup event, and even enter UEFI for more hardware-related configuration.instantly view boot logs. In the event of abnormal power cycling, error messages can be viewed for troubleshooting.
However, these are just hypothetical scenarios we’ve envisioned. We’re keen to hear from Jetson project developers about their expectations and usage scenarios for such a feature. Below is a demo video I recorded showing how the feature works in action.
Feel free to leave your thoughts below for discussion. If anyone is interested in testing this feature, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. We can provide an OOB module for testing, along with three months of free access to all our remote management features. However, we must apologize in advance as we’re a startup and can’t cover the hardware costs of the OOB module, so there will be a charge for interested parties to cover these costs.
Looking forward to your responses and open to discussing Jetson project development together!