Communicating with serial port connected devices

Before accessing devices connected via RS-232 or USB serial:

• Configure remote AAA or local user permissions (or skip this to test using the default root user, in this article we use operator as an example username)
• Configure per-port remote access services

Note: This article details accessing ports configured in Console Server Mode.  For details on alternative ports, refer to this article.

Access to device consoles is brokered by Opengear's built-in portmanager.  portmanager converts serial data to and from network data, enabling access to out-of-band consoles using network protocols such as SSH and Telnet.  There are many ways to connect to portmanager.  Broadly speaking, you can connect via:

• The portmanager chooser menu
• SSH directly to a port using a number of conventions
• The web UI's built in AJAX client

portmanager chooser

This menu allows you to interactively select from a list of permitted consoles and start a session:

 1: Router          4: PDU             6: ISR            8: Switch        
33: Front, Upper   34: Front, Lower   

Connect to port >

There are four ways to invoke the chooser:

1. SSH to the Opengear device, login adding :serial to your username (e.g. root:serial or operator:serial)
2. For a user in the admin or users groups, run pmshell from the Opengear CLI
3. For a user in the pmshell group, login with your regular username and password and the menu automatically loads
4. When connected to a port, use the chooser escape sequence of <enter>~m

Connect directly to a port

For ports that have been configured with the SSH access service, there are four conventions that allow you to connect directly to a port and start a session, bypassing the chooser.

1. Use a network client to connect to the service network Base Port + serial port number
• e.g. the SSH base port is TCP port 3000, so SSHing to TCP port 3001 directly connects you to serial port 1
2. SSH to the Opengear device, login adding :portXX to your username (e.g. root:port01 or operator:port01)
3. SSH to the Opengear device, login adding the :port-label to your username (e.g. root:Router or operator:Router)
4. Configure per-port IP aliases

Examples of the first three conventions using SecureCRT SSH GUI client for Windows or Mac, where 70.33.235.190 is the IP address of the Opengear device:

Examples of the first three conventions using OpenSSH CLI client for Linux or Mac (and other Unix-like):

# SSH to serial port 1 by TCP port
ssh -p 3001 -l operator 70.33.235.190

# SSH to serial port labelled Router
ssh -l operator:Router 70.33.235.190

# SSH to serial port 1 by port name
ssh -l operator:port01 70.33.235.190

Connect via the web UI

Ports that have been configured with the Web Terminal access service can be accessed using the terminal emulator built-in to the Opengear web UI.  The terminal emulator is based on open source shellinabox and uses pure AJAX so requires no special runtimes such as Java.

Note: Web Terminal is not a fully featured terminal emulator like a native SSH client and is limited by the web browser security model, so some operations such as copy and paste are not supported by every browser.

• Login to the Opengear web UI as an admin or users group user
• Click Manage -> Devices
• Use the Managed Devices tab or Serial Ports tabs to sort by device groupings or sequentially
• Locate the port and click Connect: via Web Terminal

Note: If your browser and operating system are configured with an ssh:// protocol handler, you may also click Connect: via SSH to launch the local SSH client.