Cyclades Corp. introduced a compact, Linux-based single port console server for remote access, monitoring, and management of network infrastructures. According to Cyclades, the AlterPath Advanced Console Server (ACS1) creates a secure, “out-of-band” communications path to remotely access and control servers, network equipment, or automation devices via serial console ports, which can even function when… the network is down.

The device is based on a Motorola MPC855T PowerQUICC “Integrated Communications Processor,” a dual-core system-on-chip processor that includes a 32-bit MPC8xx PowerPC core processor (running at 50 MHz) plus a separate RISC engine specifically designed to offload communication tasks. Memory resources consist of 128MB of SDRAM (on an SODIMM), plus a 16MB Flash disk (on a CompactFlash card) from which the firmware is uncompressed and loaded into a ramdisk at boot time.

The unit's interface ports include one 10/100-BaseT Ethernet LAN port and two RS232 serial ports (one configurable as RS485), and its dual PCMCIA slots enable further expansion options such as secondary Ethernet, wireless LAN, various modems (V.90, GSM, CDMA and ISDN), or other I/O devices. The compact system measures just 6.3 x 4.0 x 1.5 inches, and it obtains its power from an external 5VDC adapter.

The device's embedded operating system is based on Linux kernel 2.4.17, along with a variety of open source utilities including the GoAhead webserver (for the Web Management Interface), Portslave, OpenSSH 3.1, crontab, Busybox, nettools, rsyncm, and others, Cyclades said. Security features include SSH v2 secure shell, RADIUS authentication, IP filtering, IPSec, and user access lists per port.

The AlterPath ACS1 is priced at $495.

 
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