Lawrence's Musings

Console Server

When working with racks of IT infrstructure wou need to occasionally connect to a serial or console port of a box. This can be a right PIA especially when the box is in a hosting centre or company server room. Off the shelf console servers (think reverse terminal server) are not cheap. The other problem this attempts to solve is that some of these boxes send crash information to the console port and unless you are monitoring the port then this information is lost, so the console server can also create log files, one per serial port. I have run this with a 16 port USB serial adaptor.

Here is a picture of it in a test rack.

The Raspberry pi is the pink thing (pibow case) in the middle with the 16 port USB serial adaptor at the top of the rack.

How To

So with:

a raspberry pi running Rasbian (Or an Ubuntu install)
a multiple usb serial adaptor (http://www.easysync-ltd.com/product/636/usb2-h-1016-m.html)
some python lets roll our own.

If you are in a hurry then:

pip install consoleserver

This will install this on a debian based system (Rasbian, Ubuntu etc.) and just about be setup to go. Documentation is on pypi (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ConsoleServer) or github (https://github.com/LawrenceK/console-server)

The application runs a CLI that can be accessed over SSH which can be used to reconfigure the server and normally runs an SSH server for each serial port.

The code uses twisted a python asynchronous framework to perform most of the heavy lifting.

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