Home made terminal server

cambei

I don't really want to spend £120+ on a 2509-2511 so I have decied to turn an old 486 box into a terminal server. It has 2 serial ports built-in and I have just purchased a 6port serial PCI card from DABs direct for £20 including delivery.

I plan on putting a very minimalistic linux setup on the box, with sshd, and minicom and possible masqd to play with NAT in linux.

So it should only cost me £20 as I already have the PC (it's VERY compact and was given to me by a friend, it is roughly the size of a box of cereal ).

I was just wondering if anyone had done this before or not in here and if it worked out well. I wouldn't see why not.

steve-o87

No Idea!

Give it a try - When it works, tell us how you did it. I would be very interested to know

mikej412

Should work, as long as the serial card is supported and you figure out the cables. Used to do this all the time with UNIX Systems -- back in the "old days." I've since gotten rid of my serial breakout box and now deny ever knowing anything about cabling.

Rearden

Was that real UNIX? Nice!

mikej412

Rearden wrote:

Was that real UNIX?

Yes -- I even remember when we got our upgrade to System 5 Release 4 for our AT&T 3B2s... hand delivered by an AT&T VP if I remember correctly. Oh -- and a 3B2-500. I think we only had 3B2-400s at the time.

lwwarner

You may want to look at:

www.conserver.com

cambei

Okay, VERY belated reply here, but I finally got this done.

Well, sort of. First of all, the box I originally planned to use had been chucked out. So I tried it in one of my machines running FreeBSD (a P1 with 70MB RAM and 1GB HDD). The problem with this one was getting the extra card to be recognised. It didn't recognise the card with the default kernel (which I might add is quite old being 4.9 and the current is 6.x) and I did not have ANY spare disk space to try recompiling my kernel etc.

So, I just left the cards in this box until yesterday when I had a day off work. Popped them into a much newer box and WinXP recognised the card after a little trouble installing the drivers. Good, but I would not have remote terminal access if I used XP. So I rebooted and booted into Ubuntu and it recognised them all without any extra drivers. The only tricky thing was figuring out how the kernel had numbered each port- one port was ttyS3, one was ttyS9 and so on.

Now if I am at work or my house (I keep the routers in my parents house as my room is not used there for anything else ) I can SSH to my terminal server and type "cisco" at the prompt which calls a little Bash script to list which routers/switches to connect to so that I do not have to remember which router is connected to which serial port.

emsrescue

Check out ser2net. Its a program that maps tcp ports to serial interfaces so you can telnet directly into a router via the console.

I had it running for a while on a debian box.

Jon