Gabriel Ambuehl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I'm wondering if there's a possibility to use USB console as this > would be even better for this case because you could build some kind > of network using USB hubs where the PCs don't need to rely on their twins > for serial console access. If you got one up, you can access all of > them... And after all, USB ports are more common today than serial > ones ;-) At our lab we have a nifty homebrew program called rconsole for this. The rconsole server has a bunch of machines' serial consoles attached to it, and exports them through rconsoled, which accepts kerberos4-authenticated connections from clients and ships the requested serial console over a DES-encrypted connection. It allows for read-only access, multiple readers observing one writer, and a SIMD mode for sending keystrokes to multiple machines. There's also a delayed-return feature in the SIMD mode that sends return keystrokes to all of the consoles with a few seconds of spacing between them[1]. I keep meaning to clean it up, maybe update the krb4/DES stuff to SASL or SSL, and release it on sourceforge. --nat [1] This was originally added to keep rconsole from making the department's kerberos server think somebody was trying to predict its random number generator every time someone ran 'kinit' across a bunch of machines in parallel. -- nat lanza --------------------- research programmer, parallel data lab, cmu scs [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------------- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~magus/ there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths -- alfred north whitehead To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message