As I stated November of 2002 (has it been *that* long?!?), I had a COM/Modem
<-> Telnet/TCP/IP gateway program on my to-do list.
I finally got around to working on this project over the past week or so and while doing a little research, I found a program on SourceForge that does *almost* exactly what I had planned to write (only not quite as well, of course):
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/com0com/com2tcp-1.2.0.0-386.zip
It's called com2tcp (one of a couple programs by this same name) and is part of the com0com project.
Anyway, if you setup your modem for auto-answer and run (as example):
com2tcp --telnet com1 localhost 23
It will do exactly what a lot of sysops have been bugging me about for years. This program was created in 2005, so I guess I can't complain too much about
it being "right there" for your use all along.
Yes, I know about about R&M's dialup-to-telnet gateway program (
http://randm.ca/files/dialup-to-telnet.rar) but it requires a front-end application (like Argus) to answer the modem and pass the com handle to it.
My program (no name yet, but I'm pondering "SexPOTS") is just slightly more functional than "com2tcp" and a bit faster too. But I'm curious to see how com2tcp works for sysops as it is.
If you're running a dial-up node for Synchronet v3 (or *gasp*, even Synchronet v2 for DOS), please try the above com2tcp program and let me know how it works for you. I'm going to be ordering another phone line (and I recently bought a modem, as I had given all of mine away years ago), so I can test how well
these programs (mine and this com2tcp) work in the real life dial-up BBS scenario. I may even keep a dial-up line active on Vertrauen for old-time's sake! I can hear the carrier squeal now...
digital man (xbox-live: digitlman)
Snapple "Real Fact" #108:
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