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

In the MF/PL Telehouse rack, we have installed an ​Octopus 550 in sylvia, a domU that is installed on octavia. An Octopus 550 is a pci card that has 8 serial lines coming out of it. octavia already has two built-in serial lines. octavia's first built-in serial line is outputting the console for octavia itself. The second built-in serial line is controlling shadow's console. The remaining 8 serial lines are connected to other servers in our rack.

• Out:
  • octavia's bootloader, hypervisor console, kernel console, and getty run on built-in serial port 1, (octavia: ttyS0)
• In:
  • shadow (built-in serial port 2, sylvia: ttyS0)
  • viewsic (octopus 1, sylvia: ttyS1)
  • malcolm (octopus 2, sylvia: ttyS2)
  • chavez (octopus 3, sylvia: ttyS3)
  • gramsci (octopus 4, sylvia: ttyS4)
  • sontag (octopus 5, sylvia: ttyS5)
  • menchu (octopus 6, sylvia: ttyS6)
  • leslie (octopus 7, sylvia: ttyS7)
  • evo (octopus 8, sylvia: ttyS8)

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.

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

For example:

ssh -t leslie-console@console.mayfirst.org cereal attach leslie

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

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

2048 04:18:0f:cc:c9:2e:79:78:2e:91:f0:f2:f4:67:90:f8 console.mayfirst.org,209.51.172.10

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.

In addition - we have a serial line running from leslie's /dev/ttyUSB0 that goes to octavia's built-in serial port 1, so that octavia's console itself is remotely accessible, and logged. You can connect to octavia's console with:

ssh -t octavia-console@leslie.mayfirst.org cereal attach octavia