About SmartCom Revisited
An SSH and serial terminal for the people who look after network and telephony kit, with the runbook attached to it as buttons anyone can read before they run them.
Why I built it
I spend my days on switches, routers, phone systems, Linux servers and things with a DB9 on the back. The work is not difficult so much as repetitive and unforgiving: the same procedure, on the same kind of device, for the fifteenth time — and the one time it goes wrong is the time somebody was in a hurry.
The usual answer is to write a script. That works, and then you have a script per job, per vendor, per site, in a language the next person does not want to maintain, and none of it helps at two in the morning on a console port. I wanted the procedure to live where the session lives, to ask me for the bits that change, to stop and check before the irreversible step, and to leave a record afterwards.
So: a terminal that does SSH and serial properly, with the runbook attached to it as buttons anyone can read. Not a scripting language to learn — coloured blocks that say what they do. And a way to hand a procedure to someone else as a file they can inspect before they trust it, which is what the exchange is for.
It is free, it is unfinished in the places this site says it is, and it is the tool I use.
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Where it stands
Including the parts that are not finished. A page that only lists the good parts is the one nobody believes.
- Current release
- 1.7.0, 2026-09-10
- Price
- Free. An account is only needed to publish a button set, not to download one.
- Code signing
- Not signed yet, so SmartScreen will warn you. Every download has a SHA-256 instead.
- Automatic updates
- Working, for the install kinds that support it.
- macOS
- Apple silicon and Intel disk images, from 1.6.0. Unsigned and not notarised, so the first launch needs Open Anyway — and unlike Windows and the AppImage, they do not update themselves.
- The shipped buttons
- 2,714 buttons, written from documented syntax and not run against live hardware of every platform.