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The comms/conserver port

conserver-8.2.7p2 – manage remote serial consoles via TCP/IP (cvsweb github mirror)

Description

This program provides a convenient way to manage remote consoles.

The conserver(8) daemon maintains persistent connections to consoles,
either to a local serial port, via a network connection to a terminal
server, via a UNIX domain socket, by running a command, or (with the
"ipmi" flavor) via IPMI serial-over-lan. It can also write logfiles,
and restrict access based on user/group (read, read/write, none).

User access is done with console(1) - this allows standard terminal
commands including sending BREAK signals, and can replay output from
before you connected.

By default conserver<>console connections are done via a unix-domain
socket, but in a larger installation, the "net" flavor can be used
to do this over a TCP+TLS connection to another host - in that case,
conserver(8) instances on multiple servers can be clustered.

Flavors:

net - use network sockets for conserver<>console and to allow
conserver<>conserver connections.

ipmi - build with internal support for IPMI serial-over-lan
WWW: https://www.conserver.com/

Readme

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Running ${PKGSTEM} on OpenBSD
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Connecting to /dev/cuaXX serial ports
=====================================
As installed, conserver is running as user _conserver. If you want to
use conserver to manage local serial ports, you have to add _conserver
to group dialer in /etc/group:

  dialer:*:117:_conserver

This is not necessary if you only use it to log and control access to
terminal servers over the network rather than on local serial ports.

Port flavours
=============
Conserver can be built using different methods to communicate between the
server ("conserver" process) and clients ("console") - network sockets, and
unix domain sockets.

The default in OpenBSD packages before 8.2.0 was to communicate using
network sockets.

Since 8.2.0, the OpenBSD package has switched to using unix domain sockets
by default; this means that server and client must be on the same machine.
The old method is still available by installing the "net" flavour of the
package; you will need to install the "conserver-XX-net" package. If you
have already installed the standard package, "pkg_delete conserver" and
then "pkg_add conserver--net".

Other notes
===========
Log files (by default, /var/log/conserver and /var/log/consoles/)
can get large, so you will probably want to arrange rotation, either with
newsyslog(8) or some other method.

Upgrading from previous OpenBSD packages
========================================
If you have upgraded from a previous version of the OpenBSD package which
ran as root (pre-OpenBSD 5.6), you will need to change permissions/ownership
on log files to ensure that the _conserver user can write to them, e.g.:

  chown _conserver /var/log/conserver /var/log/consoles/*

Maintainer

Stuart Henderson

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