Mailing List Archive

Rob wrote:
> Does anyone have any real life experience monitoring 100's of consoles???

Maybe 6-7 years ago, we had a 400+ port setup on a single freebsd box.
There were 256 consoles on a cyclades gigantic serial expander board
and the rest on terminal servers. I don't recall any problems.

z!
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users@conserver.com
https://www.conserver.com/mailman/listinfo/users

That's the order of magnitude I was looking for ...... forgot to
mention I'm running Linux ..... anyone with experience on that OS??

--> Rob


On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 2:45 PM, Carl Zwanzig <cpz@tuunq.com> wrote:
> Rob wrote:
>>
>> Does anyone have any real life experience monitoring 100's of consoles???
>
> Maybe 6-7 years ago, we had a 400+ port setup on a single freebsd box. There
> were 256 consoles on a cyclades gigantic serial expander board and the rest
> on terminal servers. I don't recall any problems.
>
> z!
>
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users@conserver.com
https://www.conserver.com/mailman/listinfo/users

> Rob wrote:
> > Does anyone have any real life experience monitoring 100's of consoles???

> Maybe 6-7 years ago, we had a 400+ port setup on a single freebsd box.
> There were 256 consoles on a cyclades gigantic serial expander board
> and the rest on terminal servers. I don't recall any problems.

At the moment we have exactly 400 hosts on ours.
We are using a Dell 1950 running NetBSD 4.0
and through 9 48-port Cyclades terminal servers.
It hardly breaks a sweat, I expect it could do a
whole lot more.

John
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users@conserver.com
https://www.conserver.com/mailman/listinfo/users

On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 15:13 -0400, Rob wrote:
> That's the order of magnitude I was looking for ...... forgot to
> mention I'm running Linux ..... anyone with experience on that OS??

I have ran 7.2.X and I run 8.X now as a console manager for VMWare
guests using UDS.

On 7.2.X I experienced an odd problem that sometimes when conserver
would read() from a serial port it would block. Now obviously select()
did say it was okay to read but some strange occurrence blocked the
read. I simply killed the daemon and restarted.

I saw this happening by using strace to attach to the process and then
seeing what fd it was blocking on then I would look in /proc/<pid>/fd
and see what serial port that was associated with.




_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users@conserver.com
https://www.conserver.com/mailman/listinfo/users

I have two Conserver installations, one managing nearly 1800 lines and
the other nearly 1200. All lines are telnet-based (to Cyclades/Avocent
terminal concentrators) on a private network, mostly at 9600 or 38400 baud.

We replaced our old SPARCstation (Solaris 8) when it started to get a
little pokey at 800-900 lines. Our current systems are early 64-bit
Xeon (2-core) and aren't working very hard at all. I don't expect any
need for further upgrades for some time to come.

Hope this helps,
S

Carl Zwanzig wrote:
> Rob wrote:
>> Does anyone have any real life experience monitoring 100's of
>> consoles???
>
> Maybe 6-7 years ago, we had a 400+ port setup on a single freebsd box.
> There were 256 consoles on a cyclades gigantic serial expander board
> and the rest on terminal servers. I don't recall any problems.
>
> z!
> _______________________________________________
> users mailing list
> users@conserver.com
> https://www.conserver.com/mailman/listinfo/users
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users@conserver.com
https://www.conserver.com/mailman/listinfo/users

Steve Lammert wrote:
> I have two Conserver installations, one managing nearly 1800 lines and
> the other nearly 1200. All lines are telnet-based (to Cyclades/Avocent
> terminal concentrators) on a private network, mostly at 9600 or 38400 baud.
>
> We replaced our old SPARCstation (Solaris 8) when it started to get a
> little pokey at 800-900 lines. Our current systems are early 64-bit
> Xeon (2-core) and aren't working very hard at all. I don't expect any
> need for further upgrades for some time to come.

On a T1000 I have 700 consoles - most are actually getting the console
connection over ssh scripts to SP's of various systems.

I'm not sure what the exact startup sequence of conserver is, but that is the
most likely case of running into issues (hundreds of ssh or other init commands
running at the same time)

In the case of the 700 consoles, looks like memory utilization from conserver
on those is around 200-400 MB. CPU utilization is pretty trivial.


_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users@conserver.com
https://www.conserver.com/mailman/listinfo/users

Mark Wedel <Mark.Wedel@Sun.Com> wrote:
> On a T1000 I have 700 consoles - most are actually getting the console
> connection over ssh scripts to SP's of various systems.
>
> I'm not sure what the exact startup sequence of conserver is, but that
> is the most likely case of running into issues (hundreds of ssh or
> other init commands running at the same time)

We use the 'raw socket' connection option for precisesly this reason.
(And why Avocent fills me with grrrr for dropping this feature on their
newer terminal servers!)

John
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Hascall, john@iastate.edu
Team Lead, NIADS (Network Infrastructure, Authentication & Directory Services)
IT Services, The Iowa State University of Science and Technology

_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users@conserver.com
https://www.conserver.com/mailman/listinfo/users

Using tcp raw sockets works well for me on our private "back door" network. When going through the production network or production WANs, it is best to use SSH.



We use Xyplex terminal servers in 48 and 24 port varieties. They work great. Had 150 consoles on one 7.2 Conserver. Keep daily logs on all traffic and store off to archive each night at midnight. Scan the logs for problems and e-mail sysadmins based on which servers they take care of.



Greg Brown

Computer Sciences Corp.

San Diego, CA.

> To: users@conserver.com
> Subject: Re: How many consoles can conserver support??
> Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 15:24:18 -0500
> From: john@iastate.edu
>
>
>
> Mark Wedel <Mark.Wedel@Sun.Com> wrote:
> > On a T1000 I have 700 consoles - most are actually getting the console
> > connection over ssh scripts to SP's of various systems.
> >
> > I'm not sure what the exact startup sequence of conserver is, but that
> > is the most likely case of running into issues (hundreds of ssh or
> > other init commands running at the same time)
>
> We use the 'raw socket' connection option for precisesly this reason.
> (And why Avocent fills me with grrrr for dropping this feature on their
> newer terminal servers!)
>
> John
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> John Hascall, john@iastate.edu
> Team Lead, NIADS (Network Infrastructure, Authentication & Directory Services)
> IT Services, The Iowa State University of Science and Technology
>
> _______________________________________________
> users mailing list
> users@conserver.com
> https://www.conserver.com/mailman/listinfo/users