Free Host-Based TN3270 Solution? 28
photozz asks: "Our company has got itself into a bind. We need to standardize on a TN3270 emulator for the Wintel boxes in our environment (primarily Win2K) The Linux/Unix guys are OK already )of course), unfortunately, the budget has run out. Our preferred solution would be something host based, but a client side solution would work. Sun has some Java stuff, but I figured if anyone would have a range of solutions, it would be this community. Anyone have ideas? If it matters, we are looking at 1000-2000 clients."
hear! hear! (Score:2)
but here's some hints. go look up the code for x3270 (the x-windows 3270 stuff) and then the tn3270 code for unix. try and hack that together in wintel land. (maybe compiling it under cygwin will work...)
or do some searches on java 3270 applciations. but dont expect the users to like any of these. you cant cut & paste nicely etc.
or...
theres qws3270 at http://www.jollygiant.com
i know of a few companies that use that and got really nice enterprise license costs...
or...
http://freehost3270.sourceforge.net/
free stuff (Score:3, Informative)
Re:free stuff (Score:2)
You could combine these ideas: get a bunch of old boxen, put Linux on them, get them a FAST network connection (network will probably be the bottleneck here), create accounts for your 1000 users (or be creative and use pam_ldap, pam_samba, whatever is appropriate for your environment) and have them run an X server on their PCs. You might try cygwin's compile of XFree86. It's actually decent, although it's not rootless. I don't know what the prices are for eXceed or other commercial X servers, but XFree86 under cygwin is OK and the price is right.
If you go with cygwin, you can cut the Linux boxen out of picture (definitely a good idea). I don't believe x3270 comes with cygwin, but it should compile OK (I haven't had any problems compiling fairly complex X stuff under cygwin). Installing cygwin company-wide shouldn't be too much of an issue as the install just copies some files and runs one shell script to create /etc/passwd after installation.
But yeah, if you're looking for a free native NT client, I haven't found one. All the places I've worked at that have these mainframes (a total of two) actually paid for their clients. I don't know if there will ever be one, since the communities of old mainframes and windows shareware are worlds apart.
Re:free stuff (Score:1, Informative)
client over a telnet session. It's odd,
it's slightly kludgy.
My university does this,
because not everyone's got tn3270 clients,
and the student records software is tn3270.
Re:free stuff (Score:5, Informative)
x3270 is the X version; the 3270 package [geocities.com] comes with c3270 also which is the curses version. That's the one to use. It works fine with a default cygwin install [cygwin.com]. I've already tried it. However not everyone may want to install cygwin, but c3270 runs fine over a telnet/ssh into a UNIX box (from Windoze or any other system), so it's easy to simply set up a single (or several) UNIX boxes for the 10,000 people to telnet/ssh into and run c3270.
The only caveat is the 3270 protocol sucks, and there are many "control" characters like Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X, etc that does "clear", and "reset", etc. It's in the 3270 man pages [geocities.com].
Blantanly obvious solution...(that might not work) (Score:1)
No it isn't easy, but it is nearly free. Extra Linux servers might be costly, but the licensing is free.
i guess i don't understand... (Score:1)
Many Solutions (Score:1)
Re:TuCows (Score:1)
Because from what I read, that's not what he's asking for. What he wants is a way to directly access a linux box using a TN3270 client.
Re:TuCows (Score:2, Informative)
More Free Beer! (Score:1)
More information... (Score:2)
Someone else mentioned the clients on Tucows. I checked each of them, and they are all shareware. They might be willing to allow a site licence if you drew a nice check, but it sounds like a free client would be better.
I could not dig up a freeware client for Windows that will run across the board (3.x up to XP and ME). In fact, I had trouble digging up a free client at all.
About the only thing I found was on a search of SourceForge. Freehost3270 [sourceforge.net] is apparently in alpha testing right now, but it is probably worth a look. You might even be able to help out. It also has the benifit of being on the server side and not the client side.
5250 client (Score:1)
http://tn5250.sourceforge.net/
For those who haven't had the pleasure, 3270 and 5250 terminals are field based devices, not character based devices. You can't just use a VT100 and send different escape sequences.
I used linux boxes to provide inexpensive 5250s to our users, but that was before tn5250 was ported to Windows.
Your Windows users could run a PC x-server connected to a linux box running the x3270 emulator, but that sounds irritating.
I don't miss the green screens, but the AS400 itself was a rock. I never saw unscheduled downtime, but that's not unusual. I was only there for a few years.
Re:5250 client (Score:2)
Re:5250 client (Score:1)
Differences between 5250 and 3270 (Score:1)
Right, TN5250 emulation is very similar to TN3270 - both of which are *extremely* different from regular telnet, because you are emulating a EBCDIC "half-smart" terminal rather than an ASCII dumb terminal.
You can readily configure any good quality TN3270 transport to be a TN5250 emulator - just prepend an extra escape to some function keys, basically. As long as you have key remapping ability (something all decent emulators have) it's trivial.
I use the (relatively cheap, but not free) QWS TN3270 emulator from Jolly Giant Software in Canada to do this - it is far better quality than anything from Attachmate, Wall, etc. and costs much less.
Most proprietary 3270 and 5250 clients share resources, and consequently anything that goes wrong in one session impacts all other sessions - drop a few bits talking to mainframe A, the session bluescreens due to the latest windows security patch treading on some part of the IP stack, and when you kill the offending session you lose your other six sessions to mainframes B through G.
QWS 3270 [jollygiant.com], on the other hand, is implemented as a single session per image - you could crash one (something I've never managed to do accidentally, despite having dozens of simultaneous sessions) and it wouldn't do anything to the others. This is obviously a very big deal!
OK, enough shilling for Canucks, the TN3270 and TN5250 protocols are documented in the eponymous RFCs. The differences are pretty trivial, and creating one from the other should be easy in the Open Source world.
--Charlie
250 US$ for a company license. (Score:1)
/Pedro
Try IBM's Host-on-Demand (Score:1)
Try QWS (Score:1)
http://www.state.ky.us/binaries/windows/qws3270
Don't give up hope, though. It's ridiculous to switch OS's just so that you can run an emulator.
How about... (Score:1)
One way to do this (Score:1)
Set up a strong linux or OpenBSD server with OpenSSH on it.
Configure OpenSSH to allow passwordless access using nice big (e.g. 1536) keys.
Configure a restricted account so that it can do absolutely nothing but run the curses-based version of TN3270.
Define an SSH-command key so that anyone authenticating with that key gets automagically hurled into TN3270.
Go get TeraTerm SSH by Teranisi and O'Callahan and load it on the client PC. This is freeware, albeit with a weird license.
Modify TeraTerm's keymap to trigger the appropriate key sequences for your applications and users. This is highly idiosyncratic (speaking from experience).
Script TeraTerm, using the TTMACRO tool, to connect to the linux server via SSH using the dedicated TN3270 command key.
Voila, 100% free fully encrypted TN3270 on windows platforms!
Caveats: 1) communication between the mainframe and the linux box is not encrypted, so put that part on a secure link. 2) You still have to pay for the intermediary linux box.
--Charlie