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www.conserver.com www.certaintysolutions.com |
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www.conserver.com www.certaintysolutions.com |
This document will provide links to various pages with information regarding serial ports, console servers, and the Conserver program. My hope is that these pages will be useful for connecting various devices and hosts to console servers.
If you are managing devices, and those devices have serial ports, you can probably benefit from providing a way to talk to those serial ports from somewhere else. In some cases, the serial console to a device can be your last chance to access the device without a reboot, allowing you to restore other services without interrupting active services, or impacting you customers (however you define 'customers'). If you are not actively logging the data from the serial consoles on your important hosts and devices, I'd encourage you to read an article we wrote, which was published in the October 2000 issue of the USENIX journal ;login:.
If you support a Sun environment, and if you are running versions of Solaris earlier than 2.8, you may also be interested in our Serial BREAK testing, where we try to determine which terminal servers don't send BREAK at inappropriate timese, and can also be used with the Conserver applications.
If you find any errors, have comments, or if you have additional information that you feel that I could include, please send email to break-off at conserver.com.
The guides shown below are the result of a lot of evolution, and shared knowledge. Much of what you will find on these pages is common across most of the devices, but there is also vendor- and platform-specific information as well. I will likely add a few more guides in the future, mainly driven by servers which we determine do not send serial BREAK at inappropriate times.
Cisco Console Connection Guide.
Xylogics Micro-Annex Console Connection Guide.
I've stopped posting all of the various schematics for all of the adapters I've designed, as I am a strong proponent of using pre-wired (tested and labeled) adapters and cables. More than likely, the value of the amount of your time to make any adapter (plus the cost of the raw materials) is likely to be more than the cost of pre-wired adapters. Americable has made the effort to create and stock a wide variety of adapters for various console servers, and also has Adapter Kits for a number of RJ-45 wiring formats.
Other Useful Console-related Links
Americable has carried a Bay Networks Console Adapter Kit for a few years, primarily for Bay's Field Engineers. Americable now stocks serial console adapter kits for Cisco, IOLAN Rack+, Xyplex, and the Xylogics Micro Annex (later Bay Networks 4000, and now Nortel). You can contact Americable at 1-800-328-7954 (http://www.americable.com/). Steve Vacik has been very helpful in the past.
Bryan Stansell (Certainty Solutions) is the current keeper of the Conserver application, which adds logging, and multi-user access for remote administration of serial ports, using locally-installed multi-port serial interfaces, and/or "reverse-telnet" to console servers. This adds a mentoring, and forensics data collection capability to remote administration of network and host devices via their serial console ports. (Conserver is a derivative work of original code by Thomas A. Fine while at Ohio State in 1990. Follow this link to Thomas' Console Page. More history is available on Bryan's Conserver pages and our Acknowledgements page.)
My Minor
Scroll of Console Knowledge is currently
There is also a MS PowerPoint Basic Serial Tutorial available. This was an early version, primarily covering serial basics, but you are welcome to look it over. I'd appreciate any comments or feedback you may have about this presentation.
The author of Conserver (Bryan Stansell) and I presented a half-day tutorial at LISA 2000 in early December, 2000. It was well attended, and we had good participation at a 2-hour Birds of a Feather (BoF) session the following evening. (Aurora Technologies and Computone both had staff attend the tutorial, and BoF!) Computone brought a RAS 2000 Remote Access Server to the BoF for a demo, and Aurora advised us that they also have terminal server gear that does not send BREAK. We talked to a lot of vendors in the exhibitors room, and made some good contacts with a number of them. The PC Weasel folks announced that they should have a PCI version available in the first quarter of 2001 (though, in March 2001, it sounds like the schedule is slipping). We are also looking forward to a chance to discuss Conserver access for the Lightwave Communications 3200! :-)
If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, we are considering teaching a condensed tutorial at a BayLISA group meeting sometime in 2001. Let us know if you would attend this type of tutorial.
I'm also working on TealDoc-based, illustrated console reference files for the Palm Pilot family. If you are interested in these, please let me know via email, and I'll keep you posted on my progress.
