Yup, that's the solution I mentioned above with #5:
"5: actually be designed as a termserver - the current thing we are using doesn't really understand terminals, and so we need to use 'socat -,raw,echo=0,escape=0x1d TCP:<termserver>:<port>' to get things like tab-completion and "up-arrow for last command" to work."
Most term-server type things allow you to ssh / telnet to a TCP port and the device will expose the serial port wit some useful emulation.
The Mikrotik seems to only expose the serial interface this way using RFC 2217, which means that you need you need to use software that understands virtual Com ports (like 'Serial' on OSX, Tactical Software's "COM Port Redirector", or PuTTY or, on Unixes 'socat'). This is far from convenient….
Michel's Banana Pi BPI-R3 suggestion seems intriguing — yes, it still suffers from the "Now I have another "machine" to manage and patch, and people will try and install iperf / a Quake server / nmap / ruby / 17 different flavors of Emacs on it", but:
1: Perhaps I can mitigate that by making much of the filesystem read-only and
2: it's a great excuse to buy another toy!
I also like Jared and Andrew's freetserv /
https://lathama.net/Tech/Hardware/USB-32COM-RM option. I might see about building a bunch of the freetserv boards and connecting them to a Banana Pi…. although, more realistically, I'll likely buy a few Banana Pi's, and add them to the ever expanding pile of backlog projects…
I'm not really sure what happened to AirConsole — when they initially launched they were great. They were making new devices with new capabilities, they were updating the software regularly, they had great support, etc. At some point it feels like they changed management and everything sort of stopped…
W