How to capture serial output to remote device

[rinflux]

I would like to be able to capture all of the system messages that get printed to the console of my Linux servers. I would like to be able to capture this and log it remotely. syslog won't do it for me because I want to capture everything, boot-up messages, shutdown messages, and messages even when syslog isn't running, or the server's nic is down. The servers are HP ProLiants with HP iLO management cards, if that helps. Has anyone done anything like this before? Thanks, Rich.

[Mark McDonald_2]

How many servers do you have?

Its quite easy to capture a stream from a single serial port, but you are wanting to do this from many servers...

[rinflux]

Over 100. The trick is that I would like to leverage the existing iLO management rather than than buy more hardware (terminal server). I was thinking something along the lines of sending the console (printk) messages to tty0 or ttyS0 and then either forwarding that to a remote log host via the iLO or connecting to the iLO from a remote host and snarfing the output that way. I don't mind being dependent on the network connection between the iLO and remote host. I don't want to be dependent on the network connection between the Linux host and the remote log host, as I want to capture messages even when the Linux server's nic is down.

I was hoping that someone had tried something like this before me.

-Rich

[DAVID W MEDBERRY]

This should be pretty straightforward:
1) Enable ssh on your hpilo
2) Set up capture (script etc on your remote monitoring machine)
3) ssh remotely to the ilo
4) execute the vsp
5) periodically rotate logs on your remote/monitoring machine.