Conserver

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Conserver
Developed by	Bryan Stansell
Latest release	8.1.16 / Apr 10, 2007
OS	Cross-platform
Platform	Unix, Linux, Windows
Genre	Network management Out-of-band management System administration
License	BSD
Website	www.conserver.com

Conserver is a serial console management system that provides remote access to system consoles and logs to a central (master) host^[1]. It supports both local and network serial connections and allows replay of the server console history even if the server is down. Multiple users can connect to a single serial connection, with one having write-access.

1 History
2 Modern usage
3 See also
4 References
5 External links
- 5.1 Manual pages
- 5.2 Other

[edit] History

"Console server" as it was originally known, was written by Tom Fine, and was presented with source code to the world at large during LISA IV, in Colorado Springs in 1990. A similar program had previously been written at Purdue University. Those authors assumed that Fine's code was based on their version, so forked Fine's code, modified it and released it as version 8.^[2]. This forked into different versions (generally v8.<something>) used by Sun Microsystems, IBM, and numerous others. Bryan Stansell later merged the forks with most features and added TCP Wrapper access control, SSL encryption, UDS networking and PAM authentication support; as well as accepting patches submitted by others.

[edit] Modern usage

The conserver was written to be used with RS-232 serial wired multi-port cards. Modern day setups (generally) use separate management Ethernet networks and console servers^[3]. Generally some form of reverse telnet or SSH is used, however it is not limited to any one form of network protocol, in that command-line tools spawn can create a (virtual) serial channel (such as SOL for instance) as well. As such the conserver can basically plug (into) and manage all that IPMI jazz^[4]. Its unix domain socket support allows a VMware virtual machine or a User-mode Linux host to log the console output of guests^[5].

Conserver is generally used in computer cluster setups too, logging messages either via a terminal server ^[6] or with an instance running on every node monitoring the console of the next machine, known as daisy-chaining.^[7]^[8]