help with conserver

[Ido Admon]

It was a peachy Monday, May 20 2013, 00:14:42 when Ido Admon
<idoadm at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> It was a peachy Monday, May 20 2013, 06:02:58 when shimi
> <linux-il at shimi.net> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 3:19 AM, Ido Admon <idoadm at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > dear linux-il folks,
> > > i thought i might try here before the conserver mailing list. i
> > > have a nice little setup of a soekris net4801
> > > (http://soekris.com/products/net4801.html) that serves (with a
> > > minimal debian and mpd) as a music box. the only way to
> > > communicate with it other than networking (wlan or ethernet) is
> > > the serial console. now,occasionally, i want to access the
> > > console without hooking up the serial cable, because i'm lazy. i
> > > found conserver (http://www.conserver.com), which is supposed to
> > > do just that - allow remote access to the actual console device.
> > > the problem is it doesn't work for me for whatever reason. i'm
> > > able to connect to the server, attach to the console, but then it
> > > freezes and i can do nothing except use the escape sequence to
> > > quit. if i'm already connected at the same time to the console
> > > with the cable (of course it can't really work together, this is
> > > just for testing), i can actually see characters being sent to
> > > the console, but with no apparent response, as if it's just
> > > displayed instead of being taken as commands.
> > >
> > >
> > 
> > But is the console actually 'listening' ?
> > 
> > I mean, do you have [a]getty running and everything? (see
> > http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-setup-serial-console-on-debian-linux/)
> > 
> > I would assume that it is, because from your wording, I understand
> > that sometimes you do use the physical serial connection with
> > success... but I have to ask.
> > 
> > The next question would of course be if conserver console was set to
> > type 'device' and the device path was set to the device file name of
> > a serial console listening with the aforementioned getty ? And the
> > buadrate, start/stop bit, parity, all match to what has been set on
> > getty?
> > 
> > -- Shimi
> 
> 
> hi shimi, thanks. yes, i'm sorry if i wasn't clear enough. the console
> is working flawlessly when physically connected. here's my
> conserver.cf (192.168.43.168 is my laptop):
> 
> root at krzysztof:~# cat /etc/conserver/conserver.cf
> # The character '&' in logfile names are substituted with the console
> # name.
> #
> config * {
> }
> 
> default * {
>         logfile /var/log/conserver/&.log;
>         timestamp "";
>         rw *;
> }
> 
> console serial {
>         master localhost;
>         type device;
> 	device /dev/ttyS0;
>         baud 19200;
>         parity none;
> }
> 
> access * {
>         trusted 192.168.43.168;
>         trusted 127.0.0.1;
> }
> 
> 
> 
> and the relevant line in inittab:
> 
> root at krzysztof:~# grep ttyS0 /etc/inittab 
> T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS0 19200 vt100
> 
> and what setserial says:
> 
> root at krzysztof:~# setserial /dev/ttyS0
> /dev/ttyS0, UART: 16550A, Port: 0x03f8, IRQ: 4
> 
> 
> thanks again!
> ido

ok, i'm an idiot. of course /dev/ttyS0 is not the console itself but the
serial device. that's not going to work. but /dev/console doesn't work
either, and it seems that conserver can't actually do what i want,
which is to access the local console, not some other server connected
via the serial port. i'm not sure how, if at all, it can be done.