How do I connect to an MF/PL server located at Telehouse 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 Sunset Park see Sunset Park serial acess page; for Koumbit see Koumbit serial access..

Serial Console physical setup

In the MF/PL Telehouse rack, we have two 8 port USB to serial adapters using the pl2303 chipset robideau.

• In:
  • USB device 0
    • NOT IN USE (ttyUSB0)
    • ken (ttyUSB1)
    • cafiero (switch) (ttyUSB2)
    • negri (ttyUSB3)
    • anna (tachanka) (ttyUSB4)
    • vilma (ttyUSB5)
    • blanco (ttyUSB6)
    • NOT IN USE (ttyUSB7)
  • USB device 1
    • kiyoshi (ttyUSB8)
    • goofball (ttyUSB9)
    • florence (ttyUSB10)
    • Power Distribution Unit (ttyUSB11)
    • severo (tyUSB12)
    • bolivar (ttyUSB13)
    • fred (powered down) (ttyUSB14)
    • NOT IN USE (ttyUSB15)

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 console.mayfirst.org as servername-console

For example:

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

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

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

2048 c5:a7:2a:6e:c2:0e:79:7d:d6:ff:ce:c7:2d:30:e2:f2

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 bolivar's /dev/ttyUSB0 that goes to robideau's built-in serial port 1, so that robideau's console itself is remotely accessible, and logged. You can connect to robideau's console with:

ssh -t robideau-console@bolivar.mayfirst.org cereal attach robideau 

Setting up a new console user

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

adduser --disabled-password --gecos='fred console user,,,' fred-console
cereal-admin create fred /dev/ttyUSB15 115200 fred-console fred-console
cereal-admin start fred