Date: 10 Oct 2000 00:21:33 -0400 From: Nat Lanza <magus@cs.cmu.edu> To: Gabriel Ambuehl <gabriel_ambuehl@buz.ch> Cc: stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: effective use of serial console Message-ID: <uoc1yxpiawi.fsf@hurlame.pdl.cs.cmu.edu> In-Reply-To: Gabriel Ambuehl's message of "Mon, 9 Oct 2000 19:17:32 %2B0200" References: <14817.64539.984808.362682@yertle.kciLink.com> <114201499621.20001009191732@buz.ch>
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Gabriel Ambuehl <gabriel_ambuehl@buz.ch> writes:
> I'm wondering if there's a possibility to use USB console as this
> would be even better for this case because you could build some kind
> of network using USB hubs where the PCs don't need to rely on their twins
> for serial console access. If you got one up, you can access all of
> them... And after all, USB ports are more common today than serial
> ones ;-)
At our lab we have a nifty homebrew program called rconsole for
this. The rconsole server has a bunch of machines' serial consoles
attached to it, and exports them through rconsoled, which accepts
kerberos4-authenticated connections from clients and ships the
requested serial console over a DES-encrypted connection. It allows
for read-only access, multiple readers observing one writer, and a
SIMD mode for sending keystrokes to multiple machines. There's also a
delayed-return feature in the SIMD mode that sends return keystrokes
to all of the consoles with a few seconds of spacing between them[1].
I keep meaning to clean it up, maybe update the krb4/DES stuff to SASL
or SSL, and release it on sourceforge.
--nat
[1] This was originally added to keep rconsole from making the
department's kerberos server think somebody was trying to predict
its random number generator every time someone ran 'kinit' across
a bunch of machines in parallel.
--
nat lanza --------------------- research programmer, parallel data lab, cmu scs
magus@cs.cmu.edu -------------------------------- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~magus/
there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths -- alfred north whitehead
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