UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hey Corona, thanks again for the reply.

The remote PC is actually with me where I am locally, and I am using a (*2 Line) Cisco ATA modem and a couple DID numbers
along with the USB modems in order to test this before we send the PC out to the remote location. The remote PC WILL be connected
via ethernet as well as the dial-up USB Modem.

But... the main purpose of the remote PC is to give us the ability to dial-in to that remote location in order to do some debugging
on the router there via a Cisco serial connection cable when the Internet/WAN link is down. So in essence, when we dial-in to
the remote PC, the internet would most likely be down, although it should still have local Ethernet access. Not sure if that helps in
terms of using PPP..?

Thanks Again,
Matt

Not really.

You can set up SLIP or PPP to connect to the server's network instead of a terminal.

I'm not sure this would be reliable. You could be better off with what you have, now that it's good enough to work at all.

Ok, gotcha... PPP is fairly foreign to me which is why I was unsure.

Since I am able to connect to the remote PC via dialup already and can login to the terminal/console without any problems, I guess my only real
issue now is connecting to the Router that is in that remote PC's location.

I'm still looking to find something that could work over dialup for connecting to the Router's serial port. And like I was trying before, minicom
does not seem to work real well and the screen command, although it seems to work much better initially, eventually it gets really erratic and
lots of text gets cut off the screen.

Still hoping to find something that does not require cursor movement and can just continue printing down the terminal window instead of re-writing
over the current screen, if that makes sense...

Thanks,
Matt

Like I said, you are trying to forward a terminal through at terminal which I don't think is going to work very well.

Also like I said, if you wanted 100% perfect imitation, arranging some sort of network connection through the modem so you could ssh in would allow it.

Also like I said, your options for that are PPP or SLIP. Furthermore, like I said, I don't know how reliable this kind of arrangement is.

Hey Corona, thanks for the reply.

Sorry about that, wasn't trying to make you repeat yourself, just restating my current status.

But, I guess I'll dig a little deeper in PPP and I'll check out SLIP. Don't really know anything about SLIP so I'll look around, thanks...

Thanks Again,
Matt

I'm afraid I'm not incredibly knowledgeable about either of them, but SLIP looks much simpler than turning your server into a mini one-point ISP... In effect it'd become another ethernet device once connected. You could have a mini private network, with the server on 10.0.0.1 perhaps, and you'd set your other end statically to 10.0.0.2 when you dial in.

That's why I'm concerned about reliability, it seems more complicated and has more points of failure than just dialing into a dumb terminal, as well as more technical things to remember and more possible mistakes. A plain serial terminal might still work when a bunch of daemons (including sshd) fail to start...

I wonder if there's any way to 'crash it' to a raw terminal if SLIP can't negotiate or just warn SLIP somehow with some serial flags or what-how.

Hey Corona, thanks for the reply!

Yea, I hear ya, I appreciate the effort though... Humm, you are right, it does seem to be getting a bit more complicated then it should be. But the idea
of failing it back to a raw terminal in the event of a failure of SLIP (*or something similar) sounds pretty cool... But, I'd have to look into that.

But I was just doing another test, so I dialed into the "remote" PC, got CONNECTED and logged-in. This time I set the terminal (*i.e. env --> "TERM")
to vt102 just out of curiosity, since that is what minicom claims to be, which you can see at the bottom of the terminal window after minicom is started.

So, after I logged in I ran "screen /dev/ttyUSB0" which got me into the Router Management port and the router's CMD Prompt. This time, I did not see
a single strange thing happen while entering commands into the router. I'll have to do some more tests of this since I only tried "vt102" twice now, but
it seems very promising so far..!

Thanks AGAIN Corona for the replies, your help is very much appreciated!

Thanks Again,
Matt