It's easily done with a full (8-wire) serial cable; which 5 wires does your
support? You'll need a modem eliminator if the cable is a standard (DTE to
DCE) cable, and depending on which wires are running, you may need the kind
of modem eliminator that loops back some signals (there are at least 2 kinds
of modem eliminators -- one passes through all the signals but does DTE/DCE
swaps; the other only passes through, swapped, RX, TX, and ground, looping
back CTS/RTS and DTR/DSR, plus using one of the other pins to lift CD).
That said, this is all you need to run a simple remote console -- just add
an appropriate line in /etc/inittab (most have samples already there but
comemnted out) on the "server" and run minicom on the "client".
But you want to transfer files, and that takes a little more ... you want to
run ppp over the line. That's doable too, the same way you'd do it over a
modem connection. One end needs to be the "server" (I'm using quotes here
because ppp is really peer to peer, but it's common to call the end that
initiates the call the "client" and the end that answers the call the
"server") -- it runs a process through /etc/inittab that watches the serial
port for an incoming connection. The other end runs pppd in close to the
usual way, though since there is no dialing piece, you don't need to run chat.
As usual, this is a sketchy outline of the procedure. I don't know how much
of this is already familiar to you. The PPP HowTo is your friend here for
the details. The Serial HowTo may help with you get the physical setup right.
And to be honest, while this will work, it won't work great. Compared to an
Ethernet connection, this will be as slow as lead, even if you have newer
equipment with fast UARTs. I've done it s an experiment, but I've never been
willing to use it for any real applications, not with NE2000 NICs costing
$US15 or less and crossover cables around $US5.
At 07:48 PM 11/13/99 +0200, Cristian Carnutu wrote:
>Is there any possibility to link two computers using a serial cable(5
>wires) ?
>
>I use this cable to transfer files using Norton Commander.The cable is
>on com2, the mouse is on com1. I don't have yet a network.
>I was just asking if I can do the same thing in Linux.
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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