michalsimek/serlogin

Serial port login program

serlogin - Serial port login program

This program is intended to be used in conjunction with serio (see https://github.com/frowand/serio) to provide complete support for handling a Linux machine over a serial port in an automated fashion.

This program supports logging in to a machine over it's serial port - when that port is at a serial console, and the result of logging in is that the machine runs a shell prompt.

Commands needed on the target machine are: ls, grep, and id.

Installing

To use serlogin, place it somewhere on your path (usually somewhere like /usr/local/bin), and make sure you have python and the python serial module installed.

As of 2017, most modern Linux desktop distributions include the python serial module with the default installation of python.

Running

serlogin supports lots of options for specifying serial port settings. See the usage for information about options. Usage for serlogin is available with '-h'.

Here are some examples:

$ serlogin -d /dev/ttyUSB0 root

Login as root to the machine connected to the serial port ttyUSB0

$ serlogin -d /dev/ttyACM1 -P mypassword user1

Login as user1, using password 'mypassword' to the machine connected to serial port ttyACM1

serlogin assumes that the login prompt has the string 'login:' in it. If your machine uses some other login prompt, you can specify it on the serlogin command line with the '-l' (or '--login-prompt') option.

Debugging

The algorithm used by serlogin is fairly simple, but if you run into trouble, you can turn on debugging with the option '--debug' on the command line. It is also sometimes useful to use serlogin with 'strace' to see the exchange of data between serlogin and the remote machine.

Good Luck,

-- Tim Bird