Within the server management community, users have been clamoring for a unified strategy for resolving hardware issues—to bypass the headaches associated with multiple, proprietary approaches to server management. The Distributed Management Task Force's SMASH (Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware) protocol—a profile of which was released in July— promises to address this need by bringing order to heterogeneous server environments, allowing systems administrators to access hardware and low-level OS information. Essentially a scriptable, command-line-driven tool run using telnet or SSH (Secure Shell), SMASH lets systems administrators take control of a server at the hardware level, regardless of its location on the network and without regard for hardware vendor.
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