I am looking for some advice and recommendations on how to best go about
accomplishing the following:
I have recently come into possession of an actual physical terminal that can
be connected to a device via a standard RS232 (serial) port, so far so good.
I have a number of devices that can be connected to for maintenance (e.g. FW
updates, configuration, etc.) via a serial port. Currently I have been using
an old laptop with a terminal program (Procomm Plus) whenever I want to
connected to one of these devices. This involves crawling around connecting
the serial cable, doing what needs to be done, crawling back disconnecting,
rinse and repeat.
I can connect the physical terminal to one device at a time and have a
permanent connection to that one device, great for one device but not so
useful.
So I was thinking if it would be possible to do this over the LAN.
I know about console servers where I could connect multiple serial devices
to the server and then access each device over LAN via a telnet client on a
modern system using an IP:port schema. This works great except I don't get
to play with my shiny, new to me, authentic experience terminal device.
So I am wondering if there is a box that provides a telnet CLIENT to a
serial port device? I.E. a box smart enough that handles the telnet client,
LAN functions, and terminal emulations internally and then provides a text
based interface through a serial port that is compatible with my physical
terminal? That way my physical terminal would be connected to the RS232/LAN
bridge all the time and I could connected to not only the serial ports
connected to the console server but other telnet accessible services as all
the heavy lifting would be done on the bridge. I am ideally looking for a
ready to go, low power device, I can hide away as opposed to setting up a PC
of my own running some *nix flavor that I know can do this but is way over
kill. Oh yeah and if it is super cheap even better. Thanks!
-Ali