Conc 2.0.1 review

Conc is a console concentrator for Linux and Gnome

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 596K Developer: James Carter

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Conc is a console concentrator for Linux and Gnome. Conc project features remote maintenance of systems over IP, and concurrent connections to consoles.

Serial lines on multiple machines may be pooled into one system allowing a virtually unlimited number of consoles to be managed - ideal for large server farms, clusters or off-site server rooms.

Please feel free to try it out and send me any comments, feature requests, and bug reports.

The systems consists of three components. The first is concserv, the central daemon, that keeps logs from all the consoles and coordinates the rest of the system. When it starts, concserv spawns a number of termserv processes that control the serial lines to which the console lines are connected. The link between a termserv and concserv is encrypted and termservs may run on separate machines to concserv, communicated over TCP/IP.

The final component, conc, is the user interface. It connects to concserv over an encrypted TCP/IP link, and allows the system administrator to view the logs of a particular machine, connect to its console, add and remove consoles etc. There is also a small, text-based interface called console that allows connection to a single console.

Any number of user interface programs may run concurrently and multiple connections to the same are possible, allowing groups to work on one system. Having all the components communicate by TCP/IP allows administration of machines from off site or unifying management of co-located and local equipment.

What's New in This Release:
This release improves the reliability of the connection between manager and servers, and removes the worst of the memory leaks from the client.