Re: Serial Terminal Servers

[Chuck Yerkes <chuck@snew.com>]

I picked up a 16 port Annex terminal server on barter (I
didn't want to carry a laser printer cross country and
since CA has no electricity, it was a good call).  These
things (many brands) are on eBay and such all the time.
So about any terminal server works just fine.  Put a pull
up resistor in to keep Sun's from getting a break with
the TS resets and throw conserver on a machine to handle
it, you're done.  For the security aware, put it on a
spare network segment with one of two "gateway" machines
that run ssh (2 for redundancy).

Unix machines should be managed via console serial ports.
Bonus points for power management over serial port.

Hardware terminal servers tend not to reboot - for years.
Serial ports on Unix boxes do.

Quoting Lance A. Brown (brown9@niehs.nih.gov):
> The mention of conserver in the NetApp vs. EMC thread reminded me 
> that I'm supposed to be looking at serial port terminal server 
> solutions.
> 
> My preference is to hang a bunch of serial ports off a UNIX system 
> and use conserver to manage them vs. some kind of standalone 
> network-attached terminal server gadget.