The ttywatch port monitoring software

ttywatch was originally designed to log serial console output from lots of Linux machines on a single monitor machine. It:

• Handles log rotation correctly.
• Can be configured in both a configuration file and on the command line (mix-and-match command-line and config file). The config file language is the same as the command-line language; learn one and you know both. Any configuration that can be specified on the command line can be specified in exactly the same way in a configuration file, and vice versa.
• Supports arbitrary data logging methods via dynamically loaded modules.
• Can optionally connect any monitored port to a network socket, and it can support arbitrarily many telnet connections to each port. The connections work together in "whiteboard" fashion; all output is shown to every connection and input is accepted from all connections.
• Can connect to network ports speaking the telnet protocol as well as to serial ports; this allows ttywatch instances to be cascaded. For example, in a room full of servers, each with two serial ports, you could run ttywatch on computer in pairs, each logging output from the other, and then use ttywatch on a master computer to log all the output from each ttywatch instance on the individual computers in one master set of logfiles.
• Includes a fairly complete man page.
• Is packaged with all the pieces necessary for use, including config files, init script, and so forth.
• Depends on lockdev, popt, and glib.

Future enhancements may (especially if other folks get interested and start contributing code) include:

• Enable incoming SSL encrypted connections, compatible with ssl-telnet.
• Optional authentication of network connections. (Must be optional because in some circumstances it is not desired.)
• The ability to log output from even more data sources:
  • plain network socket, no telnet protocol data
  • ssh, probably done by running ssh locally and talking to ssh on a pseudo-tty; there are now terminal servers that support the ssh protocol.
  • SSL (mostly for cascading ttywatch with SSL)
  • UDP netconsole data

Tarballs are available:

Version	.tar.gz	.tar.bz2
0.14	ttywatch-0.14.tar.gz	ttywatch-0.14.tar.bz2
0.13	ttywatch-0.13.tar.gz	ttywatch-0.13.tar.bz2
0.12	ttywatch-0.12.tar.gz	ttywatch-0.12.tar.bz2
0.11	ttywatch-0.11.tar.gz	ttywatch-0.11.tar.bz2
0.10	ttywatch-0.10.tar.gz	ttywatch-0.10.tar.bz2
0.9	ttywatch-0.9.tar.gz	ttywatch-0.9.tar.bz2
0.8	ttywatch-0.8.tar.gz	ttywatch-0.8.tar.bz2
0.7	ttywatch-0.7.tar.gz	ttywatch-0.7.tar.bz2
0.6	ttywatch-0.6.tar.gz	ttywatch-0.6.tar.bz2
0.5	ttywatch-0.5.tar.gz	ttywatch-0.5.tar.bz2
0.4	ttywatch-0.4.tar.gz	ttywatch-0.4.tar.bz2
0.3	ttywatch-0.3.tar.gz	ttywatch-0.3.tar.bz2
0.2	ttywatch-0.2.tar.gz	ttywatch-0.2.tar.bz2
0.1	ttywatch-0.1.tar.gz	ttywatch-0.1.tar.bz2

Screen shots aren't too generally useful, but perhaps a sample configuration file could demonstrate what you can do with ttywatch.

# This is an example /etc/ttywatch.conf configuration file
# Any options that you can use on the command line you can
# use in this file.  You can even use the --config option
# to include other files!  In the default configuration,
# the --pidfile option will be ignored because it is
# overridden in the /etc/rc.d/init.d/ttywatch file.
#
# The default configuration, /etc/rc.d/init.d/ttywatch will
# also read all files in /etc/ttywatch.d/ as configuration
# files.  Those files will be read AFTER this main configuration
# file.
#
# This configuration file will be read by default by the
# ttywatch service init script (/etc/rc.d/init.d/ttywatch)
# but is not read implicitly when you run ttywatch by hand.
# Specify --config /etc/ttywatch.conf on the ttywatch
# command line if you want to read this configuration file.
#
# man 8 ttywatch for more information.


### A sample configuration follows:

--name m1 --ipport 3000
--name m2 --port /dev/ttyS1 --bps 9600  --ipport 3001
--name m3 --port /dev/ttyS2 --bps 57600 --ipport 3002
--name m4 --port othermachine.example.com:3000 --ipport 3003

###
### machine one (m1) is connected to /dev/m1 and talks 115200 bps (default)
###   its log is kept in /var/log/ttywatch/m1.log
###   /dev/m1 is a link to /dev/ttyS0
###   telnet to port 3000 to interact with this port
### machine two (m2) is connected to ttyS1 and talks 9600 bps
###   its log is kept in /var/log/ttywatch/m2.log
###   telnet to port 3001 to interact with this port
### machine three (m3) is connected to ttyS2 and talks 57600 bps
###   its log is kept in /var/log/ttywatch/m3.log
###   telnet to port 3002 to interact with this port
### machine four (m4) is available via port 3000 on othermachine.example.com
###   its log is kept in /var/log/ttywatch/m4.log
###   telnet to port 3003 on THIS host to interact with port 3000 on
###   othermachine.example.com
###
### NOTE: network connections are not authenticated in ANY WAY.  Do not
### use the --ipport (-i) option if any untrusted users can connect to
### the ports you choose.  Only use it in secure environments.  You
### have been warned...

Other programs with similar purposes include:

• Conserver
• rtty
• ser2net