Gabriel Ambuehl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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
[EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------------- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~magus/
there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths -- alfred north whitehead


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