Re: Telnet to serial port

["Juhani Pirttilahti" <juhani.pirttilahti@mbnet.fi>]

On 9.7.2004 at 9:28 Ryan Underwood wrote:

>On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 02:13:04PM +0300, Juhani Pirttilahti wrote:
>> I've got to run PCBoard under dosemu, works like a charm in local mode.
>> There is still a problem. Lets say I want to run 5 instances of dosemu +
>pcboard, I need then
>> a telnet server, which maintains connections to these 5 instances.
>
>Sure.  standard telnet/ssh will do this.  Unless you are trying to
>multiplex all these connections onto one listening telnet port.  Then you
>will
>have to write your own "hub" program to direct the user to the right
>node.
>
>To me, it makes more sense to have each listening node associated
>with a particular listening IP port (:2323, :2324, :2325, :2326 ... ).
>Then it is simple.  Create a sh script which starts dosemu and the BBS
>in the "already connected" mode, like if a frontend mailer such as
>FrontDoor was used to pass control to the BBS.  Then have that script 
>file executed as a login script when a user telnets in.  You can use
>exactly the same virtual com port for each node, then you only need one
>port configured as virtual (COM1).  Every time you run a new dosemu,
>COM1 is corresponding to the telnet connection for _that_ dosemu.  So
>you can have e.g. 16 dosemus running at once for all your 16 nodes, all
>configured to run on COM1, and each COM1 a particular node is using,
>corresponds to the telnet connection which initiated the DOS session
>that the BBS instance runs in.
>
>If that is confusing, just ask for clarification.  I use this method to
>run DOS doors through Synchronet (for Unix).  The idea is the same.  One
>thing that may confuse you is that there is no modem emulator (like
>vmodem for OS/2), only a COM/FOSSIL emulator, which takes
>console/terminal I/O on the outside and redirects it to appear as if it
>was received on a COM port (or from FOSSIL driver) on the inside of the
>DOS box.  The virtual COM port on the DOS box corresponds to no physical
>COM port, only to the I/O from the outside.  It also has nothing in
>common with any other virtual COM ports in any other concurrently
>running DOS boxes.  This is why you can just set COM1 for every PCBoard
>node and it will work fine if executed as if the COM port has a modem on
>it that is already connected.  What you _cannot_ do is run PCBoard and
>have it "answer the phone".  That would require a modem emulator which
>we do not have (and don't really need).

Ah, fine, this idea is somewhat better and sounds like that it will be much
easier to build. So, If I write "hub" script, it would have to do these things:
1) Find a free node, (check if no lockfile exist) (for example, 2 is free)
2) Create a lock file for this session (lock.2 for node 2)
3) Launch dosemu with PCBoard using node2.bat (it contains node number
environment variable and command line parameters)
4) Finally, when session is ended, we can delete lock file.

I need to know how do I launch dosemu? How telnet connection will go to COM1...?
And I have to add $_com1 = "virtual" to dosemu.conf, right?