The conserver program has fractured into a number of
versions. The home page referenced below seems to be the latest and most featureful
version around, and for July 2004 carries a version number of “8.1.9”. This
is maintained by Bryan Stansell <bryan@conserver.com>, who has brought
together the work of many people (listed on his webpage).
The FreeBSD ports collection contains a port for version 8.5 of conserver at comms/conserver. This seems to be older and less featureful
than the 8.1.9 version (in particular, it does not support consoles connected to terminal
server ports and does not support a conserver.passwd file), and
is written in a fairly idiosyncratic manner (using a preprocessor to generate C code).
Version 8.5 is maintained by Kevin S. Braunsdorf <ksb+conserver@sa.fedex.com> who
did most of the original work on conserver, and whose work
Bryan Stansell is building on. The 8.5 version does support one feature not in the 8.1.9
version (controlling power to remote machines via a specific serial-interfaced power
controller hardware).
Beginning with December 2001, Brian's version (currently 8.1.9) is also presented in ports collection at comms/conserver-com. We therefore recommend you to use this version as it is much more appropriate for console server building.