Re: conserver as serial portserver?

Sun, 7 Nov 2004 12:37:54 -0800 (PST) · Frank R. Schneider

[ On Sunday, November 7, 2004 at 00:32:08 (+0100), Frank R. Schneider wrote: ]
> Subject: conserver as serial portserver?
>
> What I really want is to connect to the consoles on ttya and ttyb via
> a command like "telnet localhost <port>" where port should be specific
> for either ttya or ttyb - i.e. I want to substitute the missing annex
> by the conserver SW.
>
> Does anyone know, how conserver.cf has to be modified to get this working?

I'm not really sure why you'd want to use clunky old "telnet" in place
of the much more featureful "console" client command.  :-)

In fact I use conserver to front-end my terminal servers through their
telnet feature and if I could compile and build conserver to run
directly on my terminal server (as you can on your SS5) then I'd be very
happy to get rid of the unnecessary intermediate TELNET layer.  ;-)

However if you really do want only to implement a reverse-telnet
terminal server on a unix host then conserver is not the right tool for
the job.  Conserver does something similar to what you want to do but it
does not use any standard widely implemented protocol such as TELNET.  A
TELNET interface is a feature that could be implemented in conserver of
course, but given the existing "console" client program is quite
portable and given the private protocol it uses is so much more capable
for the desired features than TELNET is, I hardly see the point.

You might want to have a look around for something called TermPkg as it
does implement exactly what you say you want.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available at its old home location:

	ftp://ftp.linuxlots.com/usr/termpkg/termpkg-3.3.tar.gz

It does still have a FreshMeat project page though:

	http://freshmeat.net/projects/termpkg/

Perhaps the linuxlots.com services are just partly down temporarily for
some reason....