Simple Perl Script To Ease Console Server Use On Linux And Unix

Howdy,

Well, it's been a good long time (almost a week) since I've posted anything but numbered lists of, hopefully, useful information. It's about time for a little scripting. So, just to maintain my sanity (if not your own - assuming you follow this blog a bit, for which I thank you), today I'm putting up a little Perl script I wrote to maintain connections to a simple Cyclades console server. It can be re-worked fairly easily to connect to multiple console servers of any kind.

Technically, this script could be used for any server which accepts connections over telnet (Which this script is set up to use, even though I'm pretty sure I fought the good fight arguing against it). For more information on why it's a bad idea to use telnet for anything you don't have to, check out our old posts on using tcpdump on Linux or snoop on Solaris to easily grab user passwords. It should also be noted that I wrote this for a non-primary employer (contract). The IRS can rest assured that they'll get their cut of my money at the end of the quarter, but I can't, of course, reveal the identity of the client at this point in time (and, for ethical reasons, I won't later, either, since, given the setup, it would be like setting up a turkey-shoot ;)

The script can be run simply, like most of the scripts we put out here, from the command line. It only requires that you supply a hostname and will spit out help information if you just run it with no arguments, like so:

host # ./dconsole.pl
Usage: ./dconsole.pl [-h|-l|hostname]

This Perl script is fairly limited for a reason, but it's very easy to expand upon and only requires minor adjustment to set it up to use SSH. Since, of course, SSH would require some sort of key-or-host-based authentication method set up before this script would work, be sure to do that before you just run this out-of-the-box. Believe it or not, we've got a post on distributing and setting up SSH keys network-wide on this site, as well ;)

Sometimes I feel like I'm beginning to write in a mobius strip ;)

Anyway, enjoy, and best wishes,





This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

#!/usr/bin/perl

#
# dconsole.pl - Connect to your console server or modify to connect to a whole bunch!
#
# 2008 - Mike Golvach - eggi@comcast.net
#
# Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
#

if ( $#ARGV == -1 || $#ARGV > 0 ) {
 print "Usage: $0 [-h|-l|hostname]\n";
 exit(1);
}

# This is a simple array to list out all hosts connected to the console server

@hosts = qw(host1 host2 host3);

if ( $ARGV[0] =~ /^-h$/ ) {
 print "\n";
 print "dconsole.pl - Mike Golvach - eggi\@comcast.net\n";
 print "\n";
 print "-h : This piddly screen.\n";
 print "-l : List hosts available.\n";
 print "hostname : host to connect to.\n";
 print "\n";
 exit;
} elsif ( $ARGV[0] =~ /^-l$/ ) {
 print "\n";
 print "@hosts";
 print "\n";
 exit;
}

$goodtogo = 0;
for $hostname (@hosts) {
 if ( $ARGV[0] eq $hostname ) {
  $goodtogo = 1;
 }
}

if ( ! $goodtogo ) {
 print "\n";
 print "$ARGV[0]?  Never heard of it.\n";
 print "\n";
 exit(1);
}

# This is a simple hash to associate connected hosts to their ports on the console server

%whatitis = qw(host1 2 host2 3 host3 4);

$conport = $whatitis{$ARGV[0]};
print "\n"; 
print "Opening $ARGV[0]...\n";
print "\n";
system("/usr/bin/telnet THECONSOLESERVER $conport");
exit;

, Mike