Subject: [netatalk-admins] Serial device sharing and ADSP

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 27 Apr 98 17:31:18 PST

I'm trying to share serial devices between Macs and Unix.  I need to communicate
with serial devices physically connected to a Mac from applications running on
Unix.  The products I know about that provide port sharing services from the
Mac, like Stalker Software's PortShare Pro, are all based on ADSP (AppleTalk
Data Streaming Protocol).  I thought I might be able to use the netatalk library
to build ADSP clients on Unix, but it appears that ADSP isn't implemented in
netatalk!  Has anybody out there done any work on adding ADSP to netatalk?  Or
even implementing ADSP independently?

Assuming that netatalk isn't going to work without lots of coding, an equally
viable solution which is easier to implement would be to find some Mac port
sharing server software that is based on TCP instead of ADSP.  I know about
several things, like Stalker's PortConnector, which make a TCP socket look like
a serial port to a Mac application.  But I need the opposite, that is something
to make the Mac serial ports available to the network with TCP so I can connect
to them from Unix applications.  Can anyone help out from this angle?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Bob Smith
Hammett & Edison, Inc.
[email-masked]

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 98 19:51:43 PST

Thanks to everyone who replied, a little item of freeware called TCP2Serial by
Peter Lewis (ftp://ftp.stairways.com/stairways/tcp2serial-100.sit.bin) is the
cure for my problem.  My Unix apps are now happily chatting away with a serial
device on a Mac using TCP.

Bob