serial console

[John Hearns]

On Tue, 2002-08-20 at 18:05, Greg MATTHEWS wrote:
> you are of course right... removing the 'r' enabled boot up with and without a 
> console attached.
> 
> this should make my life much easier now that i can plug my vr3 into the 
> serial port of a problem node rather than lugging out an old monitor and 
> keyboard each time...
> 
Talking about lugging things about...
not really in seriousness, I did something fun recently.

The machine room here is so big that you need a map
(seriously- we have a PC running a Java app which prompts for
a hostname and then displays where it is in the room)

Many nodes are administered by rolling around a screen/keyboard
on a cart. Yes there ARE planty of KVMs, but its not worth it for
many batch nodes.
So its a bit of a PITA to go down there and work on a problem machine.

I hit on the idea of having a wireless remote serial console.
I enabled serial access in the BIOS on a node, and configured a serial
console.
Plugged in my iPAQ to the serial, with a wireless card on the other
side. The machine room is covered by wireless.
Ssh into the iPAQ, minicom and Bob's your uncle.

Frivolous I know - but fun. Might be actually useful someday.

ps. I did have some dark ideas about remote network sniffing 
using this technique.