Re: A2232 and serial consoles

[Ignatios Souvatzis <is%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2001 at 03:05:46PM -0500, John Klos wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm about to colocate another Amiga, and I am interested in setting up
> serial consoles for several other machines in that colocation facility.
> 
> To that end, I bought a Commodore A2232 seven port serial card.
> 
> I see, vaguely, that NetBSD supports the A2232 either in it's regular form
> or in it's modified form; That's good.
> 
> But does anyone know the best way to support serial consoles for other
> machines? I know how to compile a kernel that uses the serial port by
> default (or I think I do), but what should I do on the machine that will
> serve the serial console? Do I run a terminal program and leave it in the
> background? How do I make it so that the serial from the other machine
> gets keption and a serial program can connect to it?
> 
> Advice?

el cheapo way:

- install the screen package on the terminal server machine, and either

- run a screen session with n screens, each running cu -l /dev/ttyAn
- run n screen sessions with 1 screen each, running cu -l /dev/ttyAn

use, say, ssh to login to terminal server, then screen -r one of the screens.

(screen, because if the network connection to the terminal server breaks, 
the screen is deattached, but the serial line connected to cu sees no effects,
and you keep some backscroll region to find out what happened while you where
disconnected).

There are more sophisticated access methods available, for example
sysutils/rtty and sysutils/tits, but I haven't used any of them.

Regards,
        -is