How to eliminate slave printers ....

[ChaimBu]

The system manager at our installation insists that every console has a slave printer attached in order to get hard copies of ALL and ANY input or output on the consoles, whether these are from interactive sessions or opcom messages or reboot sequences. The consoles are mostly VT520 terminals.

Is there any elegant way to circumvent this and have ALL of this input/output written to a disk file?

Currently the printers are ancient Digital LA75 printers, for which parts are becoming extinct. Which more modern printers could be used as replacements?

Thanks,

Chaim

[Thomas Ritter]

We use the old polycenter console manager. The console are connected to LAT based terminal servers and then by using reverse LAT they connect to the console manager software.
The console manager is an ALPHA DS10.

Works really well. Allows remote access to the console on any node.

[Phil.Howell]

There's a good "ask the wizard" on this
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/wizard/wiz_9654.html
Phil

[Phil.Howell]

and..
if you have HP Openview running anywhere in your installation, you can get a vms agent that provides this facility in Openview
Phil

[Jim_McKinney]

...or, find an old PC (it doesn't have to be new or fast) with a terminal emulator (kermit will do); establish the VT session to the PC serial port and set the emulator to log to the entire session to the PC's local disk.

[Robert Gezelter]

Chaim,

ConsoleWorks from TECsys Development (http://www.tditx.com) provides support very similar to what was provided for the VAXcluster Console (one console monitoring host managing multiple consoles).

For a single system, using a standalone PC class machine, even with a copyu of C-Kermit (and logging enabled) is a also a quite viable option.

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com

[Jiri_5]

We use cockpit manager: http://www.emulatorsinternational.com

[Robert Atkinson]

My recommendation would be IAM:Consoles from Itheon, that allows you to attach to your consoles remotely, as well as monitor and record them.

Rob.

[Verne Britton]

I have the opposite situation ...my upper management always gives me grief when they walk through the machine room and see my trusty DECwriter LA120s slaved from my OPA0 video console terminals (VT320, VT420s) (one for my old Vax 6000, one for the Alpha 4100 and one for my HSJ50; just got a DS20 and have to decide what to do with its console).

My retort to them is, any hacker or system error will be hard pressed to destroy an important message that has been printed out on the paper :-)

That said, I also have been (because they yelled at me) looking at virtual solutions too ... and there is at least one freeware project for this: www.conserver.com (it runs on Linux and other U*ix boxes).

I have no experience with it, but it does have active development/support going on ... and that website has links to related sites too.

Once upon a time I recall the name VCONS (for Virtual Console I guess), but can't find a quick reference to it now or what it really was :-)

Verne