On Fri, 26 Apr 2024 at 19:43, Warren Kumari <warren@kumari.net> wrote:
I've been on the same quest, and I have some additional requests / features. Ideally it:
1: would be small - my particular use-case is for a "traveling rack", and so 0U is preferred. 2: would be fairly cheap. 3: would not be a Raspberry-Pi, a USB hub and USB-to-serial cables. We tried that for a while, and it was clunky — the SD card died a few times (and jumped out entirely once!), people kept futzing with the OS and fighting over which console software to use, installing other packages, etc. 4: support modern SSH clients (it seems like you shouldn't have to say this, but… ) 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. 6: support logging of serial (e.g crash-messages) to some sort of log / buffer / similar (it's useful to be able to see what a device barfed all over the console when it crashes.
Decouple your needs, use whatever hardware to translate RS232 into SSH, and then use 'conserver' to maintain 24/7 logging and multiplexing SSH sessions to each console port. Then you have your logs in your existing NMS box filesystem, and consistent UX independent of hardware to reach, monitor and multiplex consoles. For me Cisco is great here, because it's something an organisation already knows how to source, turn-up, upgrade, troubleshoot, maintain. And you get a broad set of features you might want, IPSEC, DMVPN, BGP, ISIS, and so forth. I keep wondering why everyone is so focused on OOB hardware cost, when in my experience the ethernet connection is ~200-300USD (150USD can be just xconn) MRC. So in 10 years, you'll pay 24k to 36k just for the OOB WAN, masking the hardware price. And 10years, to me, doesn't sound even particularly long a time for a console setup.
The Get Console Airconsole TS series meets many of these requirements, but it doesn't do #6. It also doesn't really feel like they have been updating / maintaining these.
Yes, I fully acknowledge that #3 falls into the "Doctor, Doctor, it hurts when I do this" camp, but, well…
W
-- ++ytti
-- ++ytti