Zugschlusbeobachtungen

This is the second installment of my article about the Serial Console Server for the Poor. First installment here.

The last part of the article having covered the hardware and the udev part creating the device nodes, this part addresses the part of the software that connects the user to the device node.

The serial port is still the way to access network components out of band. It is slow, but reliable, and remarkably well standardized. It does not have technical whiz-bangs that can fail when one needs things to just work. That makes it the natural way to access critical infrastructure and still being sure that this access vector still works when most other things are down.

Every communication link has two sides, so there is a market for devices with a network link and a bigger number of serial ports to connect the actual devices to. Commercial vendors have a broad choice of serial console servers. Most of them, especially the small products with five to ten ports, are quite expensive, so I have been investigating how do build a serial console server with el cheapo hardware.