Re: conserver as serial portserver?

On Sat, Nov 06, 2004 at 08:38:18PM -0500, Christopher Fowler wrote:
> Bryan is rught.  Conserver will not unless you add an abstraction
> layer on top.  It is possible to create what we would call revtcp in
> the Terminal Server world that will work with conserver.  You simply
> need to use pseudo tty's and write something based on the conserver
> protocol.  You could even do it simply by executing console.  You
> could replace the annex but you need a multi-port IO board.  All is
> possible but ser2net is your best bet.

that reminds me.  you could use inetd to handle the tcp port watching
and have it invoke the console program.  someone else just recently
shared with me his experiences doing just that.  if you don't have to
worry about authentication (have localhost set to trusted in the .cf
file, for example), then it's pretty easy.  if not, the console command
wants to interact with a pseudo-tty to get passwords, and you'd have to
wrap the whole thing in expect or some other such environment that'll
allocate the pseudo-tty.

you still won't have a raw tcp-to-serial connection.  it'll be just like
you ran the console command locally, so escape sequences and stuff work,
etc.  but, it does allow you to then log all that traffic, allow others
to watch what's going on, etc.

Bryan