serialports

- name to serial port database

Synopsis

/etc/serialports

serialports NIS or NIS+ maps

Description

The serialports database maps a name to a server name and TCP port number that represents the serial port connected to the specified terminal server host. The database is typically used to map host names to their consoles, but may also be used to provide access to printers, modems, and the like. The mapping is used when the service is being provided by a network based terminal concentrator. For each name a single line should be present with the following information:

host-name    concentrator-hostname tcp-port-number

Items are separated by any number of blanks or TAB characters. A pound sign (#)indicates the beginning of a comment. Characters between the pound sign and the end of the line are not interpreted by routines that search the file.

This information is used by the cconsole or cssh command to establish connection to a group of consoles of a cluster of network hosts. The names that are used in this database must be host names, as used in the /etc/inet/hosts database.

To support Secure Shell connections to node consoles through the cssh command, specify in the /etc/serialports file the name of the console-access device and the Secure Shell port number for each node. If you use the default Secure Shell configuration on the console-access device, specify port number 22.

For E10000 nodes, the entries are different. This is because E10000 uses netcon for console purposes, which operates over a network and executes on the SSP. The following is the generic format for the entry.

hostname SSPname 23

The database is available from either the NIS or NIS+ maps or a local file. Lookup order is specified by the serialports entry in the /etc/nsswitch.conf file, if present. If no search order is specified, the default order is nis files.

Examples

Example 1 A Sample /etc/serialports File

The following is an example /etc/serialports file:

# Network host to port database



#  NFS server cluster

mercury        planets-tc    5001

venus        planets-tc    5002



# E10000 server cluster

cashews         nuts-ssp-1 23

pecans          nuts-ssp-2 23

Example 2 A Sample /etc/nsswitch.conf File Entry

The following is a typical /etc/nsswitch.conf entry:

serialports: nis files

Files

/etc/serialports

/etc/nsswitch.conf

Attributes

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

See Also

cconsole(1M), chosts(1M), cports(1M), cssh(1M), clusters(4), nsswitch.conf(4), attributes(5)