remote serial console (IP to Serial)

Wed Mar 9 18:48:06 UTC 2016

For a long time I used an Equinox SST which was a PCI card and a
plugboard of (daisy-chain-able up to 128) 16 x RJ-45 serial ports. It
was handy in one machine room, usually a Cat-5 RJ-45 cable with a
D-connector was all that was needed.

Unfortunately the Linux driver seems to have disappeared into the
sands of time though it would work with something like SuSE 9.x, maybe
10.x. That is, 2.4 maybe 2.6 kernels, I don't think SuSE mattered but
that's what I used.

With the driver and hardware installed it would present as a bunch of
/dev/ttyQ?? devices.

I'd use an xterm workalike 'eterm' which could take a device on the
command line and it'd work. I think screen could also work but firing
up separate terminal windows for different ports was convenient. And
eterm was rather pretty, not sure what happened to it, but you could
probably use kermit or cu etc in a pinch with enough magic.

I'm curious if anyone still uses this and perhaps got it working with
more modern kernels? I believe it's mentioned in the newer kernel
build configuration (make xconfig, whatever) but doesn't work.

Not a big deal to install an old OS on a spare machine. Or perhaps
even in a virtual machine with some sort of device passthru? Never
looked into that.

No idea where you'd find the hardware but it was a neat device and if
you can't find their driver stuff I could send it to you as a tarball
tho I think it's still up on whatever Equinox became. Ok here it is I
noted it:

  http://www.connectivity.avocent.com/drivers/superserial/eqnx_4.12d.asp

So you'd just login to that machine and fire up windows to access the
Equinox/SST serial ports (to answer the remote part of the question.)

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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