I remember in the past we had those nifty little nortel boxes for remote console terminal concentrators where you can telnet to them and select port and it will be as though you sitting infront of the server console. I can't seem to find any of those now. 
I want something that when you remove the serial port it doesn't drop to ok prompt.
what is good? Please share your experience.
thx, wat abt the terminal concentrator? Which product do you use? And possible how much did you roughly pay, I looking to get one for our boxes, I heard the cisco 1313A c/w 16 ports is used by sun though I can't seem to find the product mentioned on the sun website.
anybody currently using the cisco 1313A terminal concentrator switch?
You really need to specify how many servers you need to support.
The last place I worked used Aurora cards link. We would plug these cards into old sparc servers. They worked good enough I guess. Don't know about cost...I didn't pay the bills. It's been about 10 years since I used xyplex hardware, but I would rather try something like that. You can probably find an mx-1620 on ebay for under $800. But I would go with some stand-alone unit rather than cards that plug into old sparcs.
we have abt 16 unix boxes and maybe a bunch of other appliances like firewalls, routers, load balancers etc ..
I previously used those brown little boxes from nortel which sun recommended, it basically has a built-in network interface for an IP address and up to 8/16 serial ports, basically connect from TS out to server side serial port DTE - RS232 I think.
You could telnet to it remotely into the TS and make a rs232 connection to a unix box as though you were sitting infront of the server console. Pretty good, you could work from home and do things like down/plumb/unplumb a network interface without getting kicked out of the system.
Or if in the middle of the night your box went down or went into a panic loop and you got paged, instead of rushing down to the site you could telnet to the terminal concentrator and look at what was going on at the console.
Not having something like this meant everytime the box went down or everytime there's a change request you had to be at the site where your servers are located.
We use these.
http://www.mrv.com/product/MRV-IR-003/
These have 40 ports.
They have some bigger.
http://www.mrv.com/product/MRV-IR-003/
hi thx for the recommendation.
We looking at a product from cyclades, anybody have any experience using it?