How do I connect to an MF/PL server located at Sunset Park via the serial port?

Note: if you are trying to connect to a server in our XO/Bandcon, see our XO serial access page; for Telehouse see Telehouse serial acess page.

Serial Console physical setup

In Sunset Park we have an 8 port USB to serial adapter using the pl2303 chipset that is plugged into our office router (ida.mayfirst.org. They 8 ports are allocated:

• yaqeen (Cable 1: ttyUSB0) - alfredo/praxis project
• sittingbull (Cable 2: ttyUSB1)
• NOT IN USE (Cable 3: ttyUSB2)
• NOT IN USE (Cable 4: ttyUSB3)
• NOT IN USE (Cable 5: ttyUSB4)
• NOT IN USE (Cable 6: ttyUSB5)
• NOT IN USE (Cable 7: ttyUSB6)
• NOT IN USE (Cable 8: ttyUSB7)

The serial consoles of the attached machines are all remotely accessible (to properly-authenticated people), and they are also logged and timestamped. We are using ​cereal to do this cleanly and easily.

How to connect

In order to connect via serial console to one of the servers named above, ssh into ida.mayfirst.org as servername-console

For example:

ssh -t zapata-console@ida.mayfirst.org cereal attach melanie 

Would give you full read/write access to the console on melanie.

The SSH RSA host key for console.mayfirst.org should have a fingerprint of:

a5:67:26:83:0d:43:2c:32:0a:c5:3e:5c:0a:8b:32:10

We can also setup additional users that have read-only access to the sessions created by each of these usernames, should that be desirable. You can request such access by creating a ticket.

Setting up a new console user

To setup a new console user (this is something only admins can do), do the following as root@ida:

adduser --disabled-password --gecos='fred console user,,,' fred-console
cereal-admin create fred /dev/ttyUSB2 115200 fred-console fred-console
cereal-admin start fred