Thanks to Thomas Köhler, Dan Mahoney and Jan Thomas Moldung! You've all
given me some good ideas. Maybe I should explain in more detail what it
is I am working on.
I am the system manager for a growing number of UNIX servers, and
instead of having ever more terminals in the serverroom, I want to
connect them to jjust one PC - I have got a number of USB to serial
adapters (28 at the moment) and some USB hubs, and I have installed
Gentoo Linux on the PC - so far, so good.
One problem I find I have with USB is that you can't predict which
logical port will correspond to which physical port. To work around that
I have changed the login prompts (as well as the command line prompts)
to ensure that they display the hostname; this is why I want to capture
the output from minicom when it initialises. I do this by sending a
couple of \n, which should make the server at the other end reply with a
login prompt (or command line prompt if it has been left logged in).
I use the servername to correlate the screen sessions with actual
servernames and present it in a nice menu in a script (which I call
'conman', incidentally). I could of course just use screen's commands
directly, but this is not a traditional UNIX site in that we run
development exclusively on these servers. We feel we have less need for
security, and more need for allowing users (ie programmers) to restart
the servers if they have managed to screw things up badly enough.
Unfortunately they are not UNIX experts - they can follow the
instructions I have published for what to do in emergencies, but they
don't know a lot about the deeper levels of administration. So they
will, on occasion, need to access the consoles, and it has to be easy.
I have opted for a TTY only approach because I quite often work from
home over a VPN, and I have tried X over that line - I don't want to
struggle with bandwidth issues, so it is text only.
I'm not if conserver can meet my needs - I think I looked at it some
years ago and decided that wouldn't give me what I needed, but maybe I
should try again.
/jan
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