Mac and Linux Sharing Serial Ports?

c-tron asks: "I would like to share several serial ports from a ISDN board in a Linux server to some MacOS clients, because I want to share a pool of modems/ISDN cards to an Apple network. The service should be transparent to the user. Are there any solutions (even commercial)? The Linux side is not the problem (I could do that on my own). The problem is the MacOS client. "

why?

[mattdm]

Why share the serial ports? Wouldn't it be better to make the Linux box in charge of the ISDN connections (bringing them up and dropping them as bandwidth is needed) and then connect the Macs to it via a TCP/IP lan? Or am I missing something?

--

IP Masquerading

[dj51d]

I would think that you should just be able to set a Linux box that supports IP Masquerading as the Mac's gateway in the TCP/IP Control Panel. I'm just making a guess here, thought, because I don't have any Macs.

-Dan

Whoops!

[dj51d]

Sorry about that, I missed the part about the serial ports.

Re:And also Win9x clients

[rips]

There are a few programs (not too many!!) that do this on the PC. TCPtoSer is one and I know of at least one other (but don't have any URL's) that do a similar thing. Both have no security. You simply attach a serial port to a TCP socket and this program can connect to it and route data through it as if it were its own physically connected serial port. It works vice versa and can be handy for setting up EQL PPP connections with linux when the only available modems are Winmodems on other machines. The latency sucks however...

And also Win9x clients

[Grouik]

The same between Win32 clients and linux boxes would also be cool. If someone knows about such a product or has any idea on how to do it, please tell us...

Re:And also Win9x clients

[Grouik]

In fact, I'm looking for the opposite: I want a Windoze PC (or a Macintosh for the initial question) to use a share modem on a Linux box. What I need is a way to make a Linux port appear as a local serial port for the win client. So the client will talk to the port as if it was local (no change needed on this side) but all data will be passed to the Linux box. Any idea? Thanks for the help anyway.