Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Theo Larrieu <[email protected]> · Fri, 02 Mar 2007 12:17:19 -0500

At Jlab, we've got (50-60% so far of) our IOC serial ports connected to
Cyclades Corporation T-series Terminal servers
(http://www.avocent.com/web/en.nsf/Content/Cyclades-TS). These terminal
servers are available in 1, 4, 8, 16, and 32 port flavors, run an
embedded linux. As I recall, these costed about $100/port at the 16 or
32 port size, and more/port at the smaller configurations.
These are simple, little appliances requiring minimal configuration.
You basically just have to provide it with network settings, connect the
incoming serial lines from the iocs and edit a config file named
portslave.conf. 
Some nice features:

- They will buffer the serial console output which can be stored
locally (in flash RAM, not much space), written to an NFS mounted
filesystem (one logfile/serial port), or sent via syslogs to a loghost.

- The serial port may be accessed in r/w mode by one user and
simultaneously in read-only mode by others.

- Users can be required to authenticate on a per-port basis against a
local password or externally (in our case via a radius server)

- We have configured it so that users can ssh directly to the serial
port and need not first telnet to the terminal server.
- We turn it off, but you can also enable the built in web server on
the console server and allow users to connect to the logs/terminals via
a web browser.
I'd be happy to follow-up with more information if requested.
-Theo

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System