From owner-freebsd-stable Mon Oct 9 21:21:48 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from hurlame.pdl.cs.cmu.edu (HURLAME.PDL.CS.CMU.EDU [128.2.189.78]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 46C1437B503 for ; Mon, 9 Oct 2000 21:21:44 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from magus@localhost) by hurlame.pdl.cs.cmu.edu (8.11.0/8.11.0) id e9A4LXl44843; Tue, 10 Oct 2000 00:21:33 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from magus) To: Gabriel Ambuehl Cc: stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: effective use of serial console References: <14817.64539.984808.362682@yertle.kciLink.com> <114201499621.20001009191732@buz.ch> From: Nat Lanza Date: 10 Oct 2000 00:21:33 -0400 In-Reply-To: Gabriel Ambuehl's message of "Mon, 9 Oct 2000 19:17:32 +0200" Message-ID: Lines: 34 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0807 (Gnus v5.8.7) XEmacs/21.1 (Channel Islands) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Gabriel Ambuehl 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message