The Diary of an Entrepreneur


Using Solaris for Remote Serial Connections
August 19, 2010, 2:43 pm
Filed under: General

It is often useful to have a server connected to your networking equipment for remote out-of-bands access or even to set up a router/switch without having to be onsite at 3am.

I tend to use OpenSolaris based machines for this (although this has now been dropped from development so you may want to use CentOS/Ubuntu) and the purpose of this post is to give you some quick commands which will allow you to pipe the serial output to the SSH console.

Connect the serial cable to port B on the Solaris machine and into the console port for your device. Once logged onto the Solaris machine remotely you need to run “tip hardwire” from the command line.

You should then be connected and shown a “Connected” message. Press enter a few times to see if you are getting a response and the prompt of your router/switch. If you are not, check your connections and make sure you have the right cable.

The hardwire parameter in the tip command refers to an entry in the file /etc/remote which describes the serial port connections. By default, hardwire specifies port B with 9600 baud, 8 data bits, no stop bits, and 1 parity bit.

From within tip, you can access a tip menu by pressing ~? after a carriage return. To quit the tip session, press ~. and to send a break character, type ~#

Update:

If you are running Ubuntu or CentOS the same can be achieved by running the command “screen /dev/ttyS0 9600″ for serial port A or “screen /dev/ttyS1 9600″ for port B.

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