I have been known to do this as well. Works quite good, and supports wireguard and zerotier out of the box. On Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 6:58 PM Levon Bragg via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
I may get laughed outta here, but I use Mikrotik routers that have a USB port. Then hang a USB HUB off that with as many USB to serial consoles as needed. Setup strong firewalling on the unit, and VPN to it. Then I have all the Serial consoles I need.
And they are inexpensive
Thank You,
Levon Bragg
Shift Computer Services
Phone 714.369.8197 x1101
Email levon@shiftcs.com<mailto:levon@shiftcs.com>
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________________________________ From: Dan Mahoney via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2025 4:51 PM To: nanog@lists.nanog.org <nanog@lists.nanog.org> Cc: Dan Mahoney <danm@prime.gushi.org> Subject: What are folks using for serial consoles these days?
Hey there folks.
Dayjob has historically used USB TTY pods attached to real BSD machines to talk to our cisco consoles, with the amazing benefit that with a program like Vixie's rtty (or conserver) you can also capture the output of those consoles in real-time, and perhaps use that data to identify a connected device.
As a bonus, because the rackmount devices have real DE-9's on them, it means they work with any kind of cable you get (not just your standard rj45 cisco rollover like you might get with a Cyclades thing -- and you don't have to come up with the weird-ass mappings for rj45-serial like you might need like our ME4012 NAS (the serial cable is a stereo plug), our smart power strips (it's either a stereo plug, or an rj12), or something like an older brocade switch (it's a DE9, but it's friggin ODD, and I think it may also be the wrong gender).
It also means, since you're running a real OS, you have patches as long as the OS is supported (so you're not stuck with "gee it only speaks rsa1024"), versus some EOL appliance. But it's also 2u, and since we're recently buying a lot of Dell hardware, that's Super Overkill for a dell, so I'm evaluating maybe just going "Appliance".
If we stick with an existing unix box for this, I'd want something with proper IPMI/OOB (so Rpi is out) but maybe the dumbest, shallowest-depth atom64 supermicro you can find, in the event you need to do a reinstall or catch a hung system.
Are there things that other folks are using that are "easy" to work with that you've found to have Long firmware lives, decent warranties and low hassle? Does anything these days actually have DE9s on it?
-Dan
(You may have also seen my note earlier about the Cisco ASR920, which has RS232 pins in a USB-A header. No, not via a PL2032 chip inside the host that provides a virtual serial...direct txd/rxd/gnd/cts etc, on the USB pins. I've seen things you people would't believe) _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list
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