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Recommended Console server telnet listener and serial port configuration. #19

Closed GoogleCodeExporter closed 9 years ago

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
What new or enhanced feature are you proposing?
  Recommended console server telnet listener configuration.
  Recommended console server serial port configuration. 
  Recommended file/application host serial port configuration.

What goal would this enhancement help you achieve?
  Speed up console server configuration.
  Insure consistent and standardize connections to conman. 

Please provide any additional information below.
  The University of Alaska uses Digi Passport console servers cabled to the serial console ports of our file and application server hosts.  I would like to know if Conman uses any hardware or software flow control.  Is there any recommended settings for the console server/host serial ports combination such as preferred serial speed, signal control, escape codes, ect?

Original issue reported on code.google.com by ervoor...@alaska.edu on 5 Aug 2013 at 8:36

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
If the consoles are connected to the Digi Passport, flow control for the serial 
ports would be configured on the file/app server hosts (presumably in the BIOS) 
and on the Digi Passport.  We tend to run our serial consoles at the highest 
supported baud rate (usually at least 115200) with no flow control.

I'm not familiar with the Digi Passport.  According to their data sheet, it 
supports ssh and telnet to the various ports.  For telnet, you could add 
conman.conf entries of the form:

  console name="foo" dev="myDigiPassportHostname:7001"
  console name="bar" dev="myDigiPassportHostname:7002"

For ssh, conmand would need to use an expect script to manage the ssh 
connection.  Take a look at the comments at the top of lib/exec/ssh.exp.  You 
might also want to look at cyclades-ssh.exp which is designed to connect to a 
Cyclades terminal server using an ssh connection.  With either of those, 
conmand would fork & exec an expect process for each console; each expect 
process would then spawn an ssh connection to the Digi Passport.  The 
conman.conf entry would look something like:

  console name="zot" dev="ssh.exp myDigiPassportHostname 22 user pass"

One problem with this is the ssh password for myDigiPassportHostname showing up 
in the process listing.  You can avoid specifying the ssh username and password 
on the command line by specifying that information in an external file; if you 
look at ssh.exp, I added support for that via an external password database in 
/etc/conman.pswd:

##
# The "password_db" specifies the location of the password database.
#   This avoids exposing sensitive information on the command-line without
#   needing to modify this script.
# Whitespace and lines beginning with '#' are ignored.  The file format is:
#   <host-regex> : <user> : <pswd>
##
  set password_db "/etc/conman.pswd"

I've tested the ssh.exp script and it seems to work ok, but I'm not aware of us 
using it in production.  We tend to use either telnet or IPMI.

Original comment by chris.m.dunlap on 7 Aug 2013 at 12:12

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
Thanks for the information.

Original comment by ervoor...@alaska.edu on 7 Aug 2013 at 1:23