How to use the AUX port on any MSR or A60xx or A62xx router...

[MDella]

Ok, google is supposed to be my friend and reading manuals is my past time.. However in this case, goggle isn't helping and the manuals are worse... They are actively ignoring me...

I have *several* MSR20-20's, MSR30-20's, A6000's and a few A6200's.  All of them have AUX ports physically on the device.  I'm trying desperately to use one to get to the console of another. I have a few sites where I can "cross connect" them (ie, AUX to console of another, and vice-versa) for me to get to console services.  However for the live of me (and way too many hours to justify our support contract) I have been unable to either find out HOW to use them or even a pointer to some off the wall blog somewhere where some other poor soul was able to get them to work.

With cisco, practically out of the box since the 90s you could telnet (and later ssh) to port 2001 to get to the first AUX port without configurations.  You could do other interesting things to get the port to do other things, but thats basically it.  Few seconds, and viola, you're on the console of something else...

With the HP equipment, here I am months later, experiment after experiment, note after note and even a few technical requests and the only answer I've repeatedly gotten is "it works, not a big deal, let me see if I can get someone to help you", only... no one ever comes up with an answer.

So, here I am in London, on a longhaul trip setting up a site for remote management, Its almost 11pm on a Sunday night, one night before a flight back to CA,USA with the next person to come out here schedule for a year away... and it *really* would be nice to not have to call remote hands at $100/hr each time because we can't get this to work...

Does *ANYONE* have an idea or has anyone made it work?

Marcos

[MDella]

Ok, another two weeks of experimentation and as far as I can tell, this is a worthless port that does nothing.  Possibly its there to "look" like a cisco but there is basically no documentation on this port nor examples on what to do with it.  I see there is a user-interface, but for the life of me, I cannot go outbound with it nor tie it to any port for an external connection.  Quite honestly, this basic functionality has been around since the Cisco 2501 almost 20 years ago... 

Rather frustrating that no one at HP seems to even know what its for (I've now talked to several support people and have basically been given the "blank stare" reply).

[MDella]

Ok, another two weeks go by and finally found someone that forwarded to the tac that forwarded to engineering that forwarded to the product engineer only to have a discussion amongst themselves why anyone would be using this as a serial port... etc...

But I finally got a partial answer (which I'm posting as its still not mentioned anywhere).  These are the *additions* to my current configuration to get this working.  Some notes on the config:

1. An ACL had to be created specifically for the NETWORK port that I would be coming into. This is because currently the AUX port does NOT support acls for inbound connections.  So we had to ACL it a completely different way.  Unfortunate because I already distribute ACLs that I use for the VTY that I would have liked to use here.

2. We removed DSR-DTR detection as those are typically used with modems or other devices where the transmission rate and baud rate often cause buffer overflows and needs a hardware method of stopping the flow of traffic. (XON and XOFF software controls still work)

3. The is no default port assignment for AUX ports.   Apparently 3COM (history) never had a large enough customer base like cisco to demand "out-of-band" management and therefore never got around to creating something simple to use.  So we have to actually activate a redirect and assign it a port manually.

I still haven't tested if I can carry this over SSH to the AUX port (something that did take cisco almost a decade to get working) but if you see my previous post, I'm now having SSH problems with the latest version of software.

---

acl number 3000
   description Filter out most attempts to get to the AUX port
   rule 20 permit tcp source 12.23.34.0 0.0.0.255 destination-port eq 2001
   rule 30 permit tcp source 205.42.203.0 0.0.0.255 destination-port eq 2001
   rule 40 permit tcp source 206.115.204.0 0.0.0.255 destination-port eq 2001
   rule 50 deny tcp destination-port eq 2001 counting
interface Aux0
   description CONSOLE cable to the LHR-TW-CONS1
   async mode flow
   undo detect dsr-dtr
interface Ethernet0/0
   firewall packet-filter 3000 inbound
user-interface aux 0
   authentication-mode none
   user privilege level 1
   undo shell
   idle-timeout 15 0
   redirect enable
   redirect timeout 90
   redirect listen-port 2001
   terminal type vt100