[tech] Serial terminals in the hallway

[Nick Bannon]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 05:42:16PM +0800, Luke Williams wrote:
> Merlo is a wheel-only box at the moment. There are a few different
> options for opening the serial terminals to members:
> - Remove the login restrictions.

That's a pretty good option. It's already a LDAP client, which suprised
me, but I guess dispsrv as it stands needs that. I'd like to see what it
takes to make it work standalone if the network was down.

> - Create a restricted login environment on merlo (eg: a VM with serial
> passthrough)

Maybe, or something like (thanks [DAA]!):
meersau:/opt/ltsp/i386/usr/share/ltsp/screen.d/ssh

> - Send the serial data somewhere else. If there's a standard way of
> doing this I'd like to hear it. I have in mind an inetd entry piping
> data through the serial port on merlo and getty piping data through
> netcat in the login host's inittab. Your incentive to suggest
> something better is that I might actually do it.

ser2net, sredird are good servers, not sure what the best RFC-2217-ish client
is. Possibly "nvtty: Network Virtual Terminal":

http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1101.1/00440.html

Nick.

-- 
   Nick Bannon   | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick-sig at rcpt.to | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal