I spent a while yesterday playing with an OpenGear serial console device. It presents an interface to a number of devices via TCP.
Unfortunately it is a little flawed for our purposes. We'd like to be able to telnet directly to a serial console of a connected device, like so:
telnet $ip 2000+N
That would give us the serial console of the device in port N.
However rather than dropping us straight into the serial console it instead presents a login: + password: prompt. We'd like that removed.
The solution according to the manual is to enable the use of RFC 2217 - but that will be a pain.
Apparently downloading the CDK will allow a new firmware to be built, and I could fix this problem. Unfortunately the firmware produced by this built fails to flash - failing with an error "Error: Firmware is for a different product".
Sigh.
Still I have got a partial solution. / is mounted read-only. But /etc/config is writable and /etc/config/rc.local is executed at boot-time.
My file contains this:
#!/bin/sh
if [ ! -d /tmp/bin ]; then
mkdir /tmp/bin
fi
# fake login which won't prompt for username / password
echo '#!/bin/sh' > /tmp/bin/login
echo 'pmshell -l $4' >> /tmp/bin/login
chmod 755 /tmp/bin/login
# fake inetd which exists with the modified PATH so our
# fake login will be invoked.
echo '#!/bin/sh' > /tmp/bin/inetd
echo 'PATH=/tmp/bin:$PATH /bin/inetd $*' >> /tmp/bin/inetd
chmod 755 /tmp/bin/inetd
# use our inetd
kill -9 $(ps -f | grep [i]net| awk '{print $1}')
/tmp/bin/inetd &
Suprisingly this solution works, but it is nasty.
If anybody has any success rebuilding firmware for a CM4148 (running stock 2.3.1u3 firmware currently) I'd appreciate pointers. Unfortunately the source contained upon the opengearweb.org website also fail to flash, when rebuilt.
ObQuote: Shooting Fish