James B. Byrne wrote:
I have an i686 mono core system configured as a CentOS-5.2 server. It has one DB9P RS-232 serial connector and six USB connectors. The DB9p is configuered as STTY0 for the attached MultiTec MT5638ZBA fax modem. I would very much like to connect my MS WindowsXPpro laptop, which only has USB connectors, to this server via telnet or ssh over a direct connection. Is there a way to connect / configure a comm port to a raw USB port in windows / centos and to use a direct cable connection between the two? Or, is a usb to serial converter device required at both ends? I expect to use either puTTY or hyperterm as the windows client. What I need to know is: Is this is even possible? How do you configure the tty ports on CentOS for this to work? How do you configure the comm port on MS-WinXPpro? What cable does one require? I have never had this problem before since all our hosts have previously come equipped with two serial ports. However, the next generation machines apparently have no RS-232 serial ports at all, just six usb ports. So, this problem might as well be faced now as later, when it is unavoidable.
I can't imagine why anyone would want to do this on any system capable of using a network connection instead. You can get usb cables that are really back-to-back usb<->100BaseT adapters and they are popular now because Windows/Vista knows how to migrate things from an XP box with them but it is still a fairly dumb concept if a real NIC is a possibility on at least one of the ends. The reason you don't see much about this kind of scenario any more is that most people would have a cheap home inernet router that would provide the network interconnect and act as a DHCP server to take care of the setup automatically. If you don't have/want one of those, a crossover ethernet cable will work with one, both, or neither NIC being a USB adapter and you can easily hand-configure the addresses.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
