[ale] Network access to serial devices

[johnmills at speakeasy.net (John Mills)]

Christopher, Joe, All -

Thanks for the pointers to netcat. That's a new tool to me and may do all 
I need for this. As Christopher suggests, it will depend on what 
handshaking the MsWin application may need, and how resourceful the MsWin 
'virtual port' utility is.

I find two flavors of netcat: GNU netcat-0.7.x from sourceforge,
identified as a "beta"  and nc110 (v.1.10) from <hobbit at avian.org>
identified as "mature". Can anyone share comparative experience with these
two?

On Mon, 16 Jan 2006, Christopher Fowler wrote:

> The main problem we had when doing this was configuration of tty
> settings.  On the Linux side depending on how you are doing things you
> may not be able to set termios settings on the fly for the serial port.
 
> On the Win2k side you'll need a method to transmit tty settings outside
> of the data stream.  I think we did this using a TCP OOB message. We
> would transmit the new settings to the serial port on the embedded
> device.  The embedded device would then issue the ioctl().  I don't
> think netcat can support anything like that.  You'll have to keep this
> in mind when things might not work.

 - Mills