User`s manual

_____________________________________________________________________
724-746-5500 | blackbox.com Page 222
15.12 Scripts for Managing Slaves
When the console servers are cascaded the Master is in control of the serial ports on the Slaves, and the
Master’s Management Console provides a consolidated view of the settings for its own and all the
Slave’s serial ports. The Master does not provide a fully consolidated view, for example, Status: Active
Users only displays those users active on the Master’s ports and you will need to write a custom bash
script that parses the port logs if you want to find out who’s logged in to cascaded serial ports from the
master.
You will probably also want to enable remote or USB logging, because local logs only buffer 8K of data
and don’t persist between reboots.
This script would, for example, parse each port log file line by line, each time it sees 'LOGIN: username',
it adds username to the list of connected users for that port, each time it sees 'LOGOUT: username' it
removes it from the list. The list can then be nicely formatted and displayed. You can run the script on
the remote log server. To enable log storage and connection logging:
- Select Alerts & Logging: Port Log
- Configure log storage
- Select Serial & Network: Serial Port, Edit the serial port(s)
- Under Console server, select Logging Level 1 and click Apply
There’s a useful tutorial on creating a bash script CGI at
http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialCgiShellScript.html
Similarly, the Master does maintain a view of the status of the slaves:
- Select Status: Support Report
- Scroll down to Processes
- Look for: /bin/ssh -MN -o ControlPath=/var/run/cascade/%h slavename
- These are the slaves that are connected
- Note the end of the Slaves' names will be truncated, so the first 5 characters must be unique
Alternatively, you can write a custom CGI script as described above. The currently connected Slaves can
be determined by running: ls /var/run/cascade and the configured slaves can be displayed by running:
config -g config.cascade.slaves