I have a small lab at home, and periodically need to gain console access to one or more of the machines. Since I don’t have a KVM switch or a monitor to devote to each machine, I will typically hook up a serial cable to port A on machine one, and serial port B on machine two. Once the connection is in place, I use minicom or tip to connect to node one once I establish an SSH session to node two. Since tip and SSH both default to using “~” as the escape character, issues will arise if you need to send a break remotely. To avoid this issue, I always use the ssh client’s “-e” (escape character to use) option to set an escape character that doesn’t conflict with tip:
$ ssh -C -e ^ host
This caused me some grief today, since the box I was SSH’ed into didn’t have my .profile installed (my default profile contains an ssh alias with “-e”). Tip is c-well!