Re: Logging in screen

[jan]

Thanks to Thomas Köhler, Dan Mahoney and Jan Thomas Moldung! You've all 
given me some good ideas. Maybe I should explain in more detail what it 
is I am working on.

I am the system manager for a growing number of UNIX servers, and 
instead of having ever more terminals in the serverroom, I want to 
connect them to jjust one PC - I have got a number of USB to serial 
adapters (28 at the moment) and some USB hubs, and I have installed 
Gentoo Linux on the PC - so far, so good.

One problem I find I have with USB is that you can't predict which 
logical port will correspond to which physical port. To work around that 
I have changed the login prompts (as well as the command line prompts) 
to ensure that they display the hostname; this is why I want to capture 
the output from minicom when it initialises. I do this by sending a 
couple of \n, which should make the server at the other end reply with a 
login prompt (or command line prompt if it has been left logged in).

I use the servername to correlate the screen sessions with actual 
servernames and present it in a nice menu in a script (which I call 
'conman', incidentally). I could of course just use screen's commands 
directly, but this is not a traditional UNIX site in that we run 
development exclusively on these servers. We feel we have less need for 
security, and more need for allowing users (ie programmers) to restart 
the servers if they have managed to screw things up badly enough. 
Unfortunately they are not UNIX experts - they can follow the 
instructions I have published for what to do in emergencies, but they 
don't know a lot about the deeper levels of administration. So they 
will, on occasion, need to access the consoles, and it has to be easy.

I have opted for a TTY only approach because I quite often work from 
home over a VPN, and I have tried X  over that line - I don't want to 
struggle with bandwidth issues, so it is text only.

I'm not if conserver can meet my needs - I think I looked at it some 
years ago and decided that wouldn't give me what I needed, but maybe I 
should try again.

/jan