Re: Initialising modems

Allen J. Newton (anewton@basis.com)
Fri, 13 Oct 1995 10:34:07 -0600 (MDT)

Philip Hammersley wrote:
> Subject: Re: Initialising modems
>
> Maybe the possibility to talk directly to a port is what I am looking for
> to solve this customer request? He wants to dial-out from his PC LAN using
> a modem pool. He wants to reach for example Compuserve using CIS. Is there
> any software to transparently capture COMx requests and convert into a telnet
> session? We would install a Portmaster at his location for that, of course.

We are using a shareware product called "ComT" for this application.

Works great for WinCIM, works terrible for Navigator (but after much
testing, we believe it's Navigator's fault).

Email me if you want more info on it (I don't have it handy at the moment).

> Another thing I wanted to do was use a Portmaster as a dial-in/-out pool for
> SCO Unix. The host device support isn't available for SCO, but maybe you
> experienced people out there know how to get around that hurdle or point me
> to a supported Intel-PC platform that can handle my software that presently
> runs (well at least crawls up to 9,600 bps even with 16550s) on SCO?

We have Century TERM on our SCO UNIX boxes which allows you to specify a
telnet port as a device (as opposed to a dial script).

Unfortunately, that means when you telnet to the portmaster, TERM assumes
you're connected to the final destination (which would be the case if you
were TERM'g to a local host). Therefore, you need to manually type the
modem dial command (I can live with this). Some sharp TERM scripting
people could probably find a way around this, though.

The command line option would be:

term -ltelnet:portsvr

Or if you have the dialout (or twoway) modems configured on a different
telnet port than the default (23):

term -ltelnet:portsvr#6000

(Usually, term takes an argument of the form -l/dev/tty2a)

Hope this helps...

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Allen J. Newton     BASIS International Ltd,  (505)-345-5232
5901 Jefferson NE,  Albuquerque, New Mexico   87109
anewton@basis.com   Network Administrator     <*>