Reply to this post | Go Back

View Post [edit]

Poster:	garan	Date:	Oct 21, 2004 4:27pm
Forum:	petabox	Subject:	Serial console cables?

The looping serial cables... Is that to give console access if the machine is unreachable via the network?

Reply to this post

Reply [edit]

Poster:	brewster	Date:	Oct 24, 2004 2:13am
Forum:	petabox	Subject:	Re: Serial console cables?

the idea was to be able to get to the console of your "brother". We have not gotten it to work, however. The problem is that a serial cable wants a master and a slave and we want to switch back and forth. we tried hacking linux but it got ugly.

A couple of tech folks in europe started working on a better solution, for power cycling and logging into your brother, but this is stalled based on lack of time to do the software.

So we are back to having standalone machines. but hopefully one of these days this will work.

-brewster

Reply to this post

Reply [edit]

Poster:	Casandro	Date:	Mar 3, 2005 9:31pm
Forum:	petabox	Subject:	Re: Serial console cables?

How about building a little serial port switch. This won't give you continuous access to the serial ports, but with hardware handshaking no messages should be lost.

Alternatively one could build/write a multiport serial port solution. If 300 bits/sec is enought it should be possible to build hardware with lots of serial ports based on the parallel port. Once done, it would definitely be cheaper than a stack of USB serial ports.

Basically you would have an interrupt timer running at several times the baudrate. It polls the state of all serial lines via a relatively simple hardware.
If there's some interrest, I can try to think more about it. I think I have the parts lying around.

Reply to this post

Reply [edit]

Poster:	sxpert	Date:	Jun 21, 2005 7:54pm
Forum:	petabox	Subject:	Re: Serial console cables?

how about using one of these ?
http://opengear.com/product-cm4148.html

Reply to this post

Reply [edit]

Poster:	garan	Date:	Oct 24, 2004 2:55am
Forum:	petabox	Subject:	Re: Serial console cables?

Use a USB socket on the one machine to go to the serial port on the one below via a USB to serial cable. I've used this type of setup via USB hubs and found it a lot cheaper than a dedicated terminal server. Garan -- http://garan.org/
This post was modified by garan on 2004-10-24 09:55:50