Return to BSD News archive
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!news.moneng.mei.com!brasil.moneng.mei.com!not-for-mail From: jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com (Joe Greco) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: FreeBSD terminal server type thing Date: 1 Oct 1994 16:27:58 -0500 Organization: Marquette Electronics, Inc. Lines: 47 Message-ID: <36kk8u$l23@brasil.moneng.mei.com> References: <Cwu5Jr.FvI@un.seqeb.gov.au> <Cwyp78.Eqo@veda.is> NNTP-Posting-Host: brasil.moneng.mei.com In comp.os.386bsd.questions article <Cwyp78.Eqo@veda.is>, adam@veda.is (Adam David) wrote: :pc012@un.seqeb.gov.au (Patrick Collins) writes: :>Can anyone give me any clues on how to write a daemon that will listen on :>a tcpip port and connect incoming sessions to a serial port. This would :>work in much the same way as a terminal server does. : :What are you trying to do? It is not very clear from this description. :You can do a lot of useful things with init and getty, but you really :must be more specific. sliplogin? pppd? : :On the face of it, you might even be trying to connect incoming telnet :sessions from the network to some obscure hardware that has no ethernet :of its own and therefore needs to be connected via serial port. Run a :login script to connect to the serial port, in that case. There are two basic things you can do with a terminal server: accept incoming serial connections and punt them out via TCP/IP (example: modem call connects to box via telnet), or accept a TCP/IP connection and connect it to a serial device (examples: connecting a line printer, dialing out on a modem). It sounds like this fellow wants the latter, but it's not clear. I have propietary software which does the former (mostly because it's written to solve a few specific problems, but it would be trivial to write a generic "terminal server"). The latter is a little more difficult, because you may need to add support to your TCP/IP client to get it to do what you want (look at Xylogics' "rtelnet"(?)). For a generic terminal server, one could do something that was not much more complicated than adding ":lo=/usr/bin/telnet:" to your gettytab. A simple and stupid application might be % cat /usr/local/bin/termserv #! /bin/sh - while true; do telnet done % and reference that in your gettytab. Security is left as an exercise for the reader. ;-) ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/342-4847