Switching

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  • 1.  Serial console from one switch to another

    Posted 01-06-2023 11:53
    I have a need to do a lot of remote management of devices.

    It would be exceedingly nice if a local support person could simply plug in a USB to serial adapter from one switch to another.

    Is this possible? The problem that is stopping me is I haven't found a client program such as cu or screen to attach to the console.

    The kernel seems to recognize my serial adapter though:

    crwx-w----  1 acruhl  tty         0, 131 Jan  6 16:16 ttyp0
    crw-rw-rw-  1 root    wheel       0, 130 Jan  6 16:16 ptyp0​

    (Edit: Those devices are not the serial adapter. )

    If someone could point me in a direction that would be great.

    Thanks.



  • 2.  RE: Serial console from one switch to another

    Posted 01-06-2023 12:41
    Hi there,

    Yes the device in itself will very probably work, you'll probably only
    need a terminal emulator. I have no experience with, I am spoiled with
    minicom, but afaik minicom is Linux and most Juniper switches run BSD
    Unix. You might want to try some BSD based embedded distributions for
    ARM (e.g. from OpenEmbedded), get a package there, extract the package
    (if it's an ipk package, that's really simple, rpm and deb are doable as
    well), copy the executable to your switch and hope you're lucky. It may
    be that the BSD environment on Juniper switches hardened and that only
    approved+verified binaries may be run. But who knows...

    I have the exact opposite problem myself, I have a switch that has a
    faulty console port so I now can't get access to it. I could try to
    attach an USB adapter, but the console nor cli won't probably be
    attached to it.