non video console output

[Jarod Wilson]

On Fri, 2008-11-21 at 09:01 -0500, Stephen Adler wrote:
> Guys,
> 
> I want to setup a system for my basement servers such that I can monitor 
> the console output from my desktop in my office on the second floor of 
> my house. Basically some way of attaching to the console output through 
> some kind of TCP/IP protocol. One way I did this in a job way back, was 
> to get a terminal server which I could telnet to, and each port 
> connected to a different serial port on the terminal server. I then 
> hooked up the serial port to each one of the serial outputs of our 
> servers. This was in the day when you hooked up a vt200 to the serial 
> port of the system which served as the console. What's the modern day 
> equivalent? For example, all those super computers made up of 1000's of 
> linux PC nodes, how do they monitor their console outputs?

Linux Networx' clusters basically had a serial console
server/logger/power control/temp monitoring device for every 10 cluster
nodes. The cluster head nodes then had both some proprietary cluster
management software and conman/powerman wired up to talk to the console
servers. You could either hop straight onto the console servers (which
were embedded Linux devices) or onto the cluster head node(s) and run
conman to get a console on any node (onto the head node was the
preferred route, because you could simply 'conman n124' to jump onto the
serial console for cluster node 124.

--jarod