[SunRescue] Egads! Serial battles...

[Tim]

emp7 at cornell.edu wrote:
> 
> While waging the battle against "Too much hardware to fit into my room" I
> decided to teach my old powerbook 170 how to pretend to be a serial
> terminal so that I might rescue old, headless suns without needing a real
> serial terminal (or even worse, a monitor and keyboard).  Alas, I
> couldn't see any signals using combinations of ZModem, Kermit, mac modem
> cables, sun serial cables and all of the above w/and w/out a null modem
> connector.  I've been using "Serial of Champions" to watch the serial
> port and it doesn't seem to see any signal at all going in.
> 
> So, I'm sure that someone on this list does this unholy interplatform
> mating on a regular basis, and was hoping that you could tell me what
> program you use, what kind of cable you use and what sort of settings I
> might be botching up.  <humor class=lame>And if you could come over and set
> it up for me...</humor>
> 
> Thanks a bunch,
> 
> --eric
> ...who has benevolently spared everyone the "serial killer" puns...
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> Rescue maillist  -  Rescue at sunhelp.org
> http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue

I used a powerbook 5300 to talk to my IPC, and had noproblems at all. 
used Zmodem, a couple din to DB25 cables (don't remember if they were
printer or modem) and a gender changer to hook them together.  did the
trial and error with the null modem, actually took me longer to figure
out how to make ZModem talk local serial than to get the cables right. 
Have you hooked a modem to the powerbook just to verify the serial port
is working?  Also, just a question, do you need the serial tool
extension for this?  I know my 5300 had it, but don't know if it was
needed or not.

Tim