[Xastir] dual port TNC

[Alex Carver]

--- On Tue, 6/16/09, Tom Russo <russo at bogodyn.org> wrote:

> From: Tom Russo <russo at bogodyn.org>
> Someone here just mentioned socat in this thread. 
> I've never used it, but
> it appears that it could possibly be exactly the tool for
> the job:
> 
>  socat INTERFACE:ax25p1 INTERFACE:ax25p2
> 
> Has anyone used socat to connect interfaces directly this
> way?  If it works
> then perhaps the little ugly ascii graphic above can be
> implemented trivially
> with existing tools (socat, kissnetd, remserial, and ax.25
> kernel networking).

I've used socat in a one-to-one connection for a TNC all the time.  The TNC is sitting on one machine and Xastir was on another.  The first socat instance on the TNC system opened the TNC and presented a network port.  The second instance on the Xastir machine opened that port and presented the local system with a virtual serial port.  As far as Xastir was concerned it was a serial TNC.  In that case you might be able to just use socat to bridge the machines and then use something else (ax25, kissnetd) to distribute among the applications on the remote system.

Socat will not, however, accept multiple connections to the port.  So if you wanted to distribute to multiple machines you'd have to somehow fan-out the serial port, attach a socat session to each fanned-out port and then feed the remote machines that way.

-Alex