cyclades-ser-cli Serial Port Interface for Cyclades Terminal Servers

cyclades-ser-cli [options] devname rasname physport

The cyclades-ser-cli program connects a Unix device file 'devname' to a physical port 'physport' of a Cyclades Terminal Server 'rasname'. cyclades-ser-cli provides the I/O interface between the device file and the physical port, running as an 'user-mode device driver'.

If 'physport' is assigned to 0, then 'rasname' is used as the IP address on an IP-based serial port addressing.

cyclades-ser-cli may be started with the following options:

-u ptyiosize

Sets the internal device I/O size to ptyiosize (maximum 4096 bytes, default 1024 bytes)

-n netiosize

Sets the internal socket I/O size to netiosize (maximum 512 bytes, default 128 bytes)

-i retrydelay

Delay in seconds between connection requests (default: 60)

-r retries

Number of connection request retries before exiting. (default: infinity)

-s

Use the Socket Server protocol for talking to the server, this means just piping all the data down a TCP connection with no control information, so it's impossible to change the port speed etc. The default is to use the RFC2217 protocol.

-m modem handling

The default is 0 which means to check DCD state, 1 means to ignore DCD.

-c close mode

Last close handling; the default is 0 which means to hangup the modem, 1 means not to hangup.

-p start port

TCP base port of servers at terminal server side (defaults: 31000 for Socket server, 30000 for Remote Telnet Server). Note: if 'physport' is assigned to zero, this option has no effect, the Telnet Server standard port (23) is used.

-d debug level

The default is debug level 0 (little debugging), level 1 debugs internal state changes, level 2 debugs events, and level 3 debugs IO calls.

-f

Run in foreground, this is suitable for running from init.

-x

Console mode: normally all messages are sent to syslogd (using local2 facility). With this option, all messages will be sent to stdout and cyclades-ser-cli runs in the foreground. This implies -f

Every instance of cyclades-ser-cli will have a virtual serial device which is a sym-link to a pseudo-tty. A terminal program can then talk to the virtual serial device and it's data transfers will be redirected across the network. Each virtual serial device will be accompanied by a Unix domain socket with the same name with the addition of ".control". So if cyclades-ser-cli provides the virtual device named "/dev/modem" then it will have a control socket named "/dev/modem.control". There is a shared object named libcyclades-ser-cli.so which intercepts calls to the tcsetattr() and tcsendbreak(). This shared object then sends the relevant data to the cyclades-ser-cli server via the control socket. To recognise a virtual modem device it has to read /etc/cyclades-devices.

The libcyclades-ser-cli.so shared object can be loaded per-application through the LD_PRELOAD environment variable, or for the entire system through the system shared object configuration (see the OS documentation). Note that the LD_PRELOAD environment variable has to have the fully qualified path of the object, otherwise an application which changes it's current directory may fail.

In Solaris libcyclades-ser-cli.so does not work with the stty program. stty uses a different interface to this and requires some extra coding.

In Solaris libcyclades-ser-cli.so conflicts with some system programs such as ps for unknown reasons. Just don't load it for those programs, it has no such problems with any serial comms programs.

Start an interface between /dev/prt1 device and a serial port number 10 of a Terminal Server named pr01, without hangup at last close:

cyclades-ser-cli -c 1 /dev/prt1 pr01 10

In general use do not start cyclades-ser-cli from the command line, start it through the cyclades-serial-client script or from init.

cyclades-serial-client(1), cyclades-devices(5)