Iain Rae Computing Officer Division of Informatics.

iainr@dcs.ed.ac.uk +44 (0) 131 650 5202

2001 0.5 23 February 2001 First Draft This document describes how to install, configure, and maintain a Console Serverbased around a PC running linux, a multi-port serial card and the conserver package. The department maintains a large number of Linux and Solaris servers, we configure them to allow console access via a serial port partly because of space issues and partly because this makes them much easier to maintain remotely. This means that we need to have a system which supports a large number of serial connections. As we are spread over a number of locations we also need a system which can deal with this transparently. Able to support a large number (~50) of serial connections. Flexible enough to provide 2, 4 or 8 port connections in remote locations. Provide a secure (SSH,SSL or kerberos) connection from the users PC to the serial console. Provide transparent access to all consoles (user only has to do command hostname in order to be connected). Prevent spurious BREAK commands being sent to the serial console (this will cause the equivalent of a STOP(L1)-a on solaris). Whilst there are a number of hardware only or software/hardware terminal server options such as the lighwave 3200 or the cisco 3600 series these tend to be expensive and in some cases provide far more ports than we would actually use in a given location. In terms of the hardware the most flexible solution (and the cheapest) is to use redundant PC's with multiple port serial cards. Websites Main US website. UK website UK Sales information sales@mptdata.co.uk 01724 280814 01724 858427