Configure The Slaves And Their Serial Ports; Managing The Slaves - Tripp Lite B092-016 Owner's Manual

Chapter 4: Serial Port, Device and User Configuration
4.6.3

Configure the slaves and their serial ports

You can now begin setting up the Slaves and configuring Slave serial ports from the Master Console Server:
• Select Serial & Network: Cascaded Ports on the Master's Management Console:
• To add clustering support select Add Slave
Note: You will be prevented from adding any Slaves until you have automatically or manually generated SSH keys
To define and configure a Slave:
• Enter the remote IP Address (or DNS Name) for the Slave Console Server
• Enter a brief Description and a short Label for the Slave (use a convention here that enables effective management of
large networks of clustered Console Servers and the connected devices)
• Enter the full number of serial ports on the Slave unit in Number of Ports
• Click Apply. This will establish the SSH tunnel between the Master and the new Slave
The Serial & Network: Cascaded Ports menu displays all the Slaves and the port numbers that have been allocated on the
Master. If the Master Console Server has 16 ports of its own then ports 1-16 are pre- allocated to the Master, so the first
Slave added will be assigned port number 17 onwards.
Once you have added all the Slave Console Servers, the Slave serial ports and the connected devices are configurable and
accessible from the Master's Management Console menu; and accessible through the Master's IP address e.g.
• Select the appropriate Serial & Network: Serial Port and Edit to configure the serial ports on the Slave
• Select the appropriate Serial & Network: Users & Groups to add new users with access privileges to the Slave serial
ports (or to extend existing users access privileges)
• Select the appropriate Serial & Network: Trusted Networks to specify network addresses that can access nominated
Slave serial ports
• Select the appropriate Alerts & Logging: Alerts to configure Slave port Connection, State Change or Pattern Match alerts
• The configuration changes made on the Master are propagated out to all the Slaves when you click Apply.
4.6.4

Managing the slaves

The Master is in control of the Slave serial ports. So for example if change a User access privileges or edit any serial
port setting on the Master, the updated configuration files will be sent out to each Slave in parallel. Each Slave will then
automatically make changes to their local configurations (and only make those changes that relate to its particular serial
ports).
You can still use the local Slave Management Console to change the settings on any Slave serial port (such as alter the baud
rates). However these changes will be overwritten next time the Master sends out a configuration file update.
Also while the Master is in control of all Slave serial port related functions, it is not master over the Slave network host
connections or over the Slave Console Server system itself.
So Slave functions such as IP , SMTP & SNMP Settings, Date &Time, DHCP server must be managed by accessing each Slave
directly and these functions are not over written when configuration changes are propagated from the Master. Similarly the
Slaves Network Host and IPMI settings have to be configured at each Slave.
Also the Master's Management Console provides a consolidated view of the settings for its own and all the Slave's serial ports,
however the Master does not provide a fully consolidated view. For example if you want to find out who's logged in to cascaded
serial ports from the master, you'll see that Status: Active Users only displays those users active on the Master's ports, so you
may need to write custom scripts to provide this view. This is covered in Chapter 11.
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