Dante Lanznaster <dant...@gmail.com> wrote: > I have the perfect laptop for you. Old toshiba pentium 75 or something like > that. The serial port on that is so real and manly that it makes Chuck > Norris cringe in fear. Ping me if you're interested.
Yes, that's probably just what this particular project needs. The evil OS needed to run the DSLAM configuration GUI tool is Weendoze in case you haven't guessed it, and that crappy OS most certainly does not deserve to be run on any better hardware than that. That DiamondCraft software (config tool for Diamond Lane / Nokia D50 DSLAMs) was made to run under WinNT 4.0 or Win2k - is the laptop in question capable of running either of those? Longer explanation if anyone is curious: the DSLAM core is a non-IP- aware ATM switch, but the management module talks SNMP over UDP/IP via a dedicated out-of-band interface. Two such interfaces in fact: Ethernet and serial PPP. The Ethernet interface can't be used until one has configured an IP address for it which is a chicken-and-egg problem, so the serial PPP connection which uses hard-coded 192.168.0.x IP addresses is required for the initial configuration. (And since it's required initially anyway, I might as well use it for all configuration and not bother with the Ethernet interface.) While I most certainly could establish the serial PPP connection to the box using any OS/hardware platform of my choice, the show-stopper occurs at the SNMP level: it's a totally undocumented proprietary MIB, and with the DSLAM being obsolete past the end of all support, I am not holding my breath for a copy of the MIB definition files so I could use a standard generic SNMP client running under UNIX or Linux. Instead the darned DiamondCraft Weendoze GUI tool is all we have that can talk SNMP to the DSLAM's proprietary MIB. DiamondCraft runs under WinNT 4.0 or Win2k according to the docs, and it seems to have some kind of backdoor tie-in to the PPP implementation in those versions of Weendoze: instead of telling the user to establish the PPP connection explicitly and then run DiamondCraft, the docs tell you to just run DiamondCraft and select either serial connection (w/o extra parameters) or Ethernet (asks for IP address) inside of DiamondCraft. With the Ethernet option it seems to just use the Weendoze IP stack like a normal app, so that mode *could* perhaps be made to run under wine or somesuch, but its serial connection mode seems to dig into the guts of Weendoze bypassing normal interfaces. I've considered having another box act as a router between the PPP link and Ethernet, but that wouldn't work because the DSLAM side of that PPP link would have no routing table and hence no way to send SNMP response packets to anything other than what's directly attached to the end of the serial PPP link. Connecting the serial port to one of my existing Linux boxes and trying to run DiamondCraft on that via wine or VMware or whatever seems like an incredible amount of pain, so I feel that using a dedicated throwaway laptop to run Weendoze and DiamondCraft would be the least painful option. And I am looking for a real serial port directly on the laptop because it seems like using a USB-to-serial adapter would be an extra layer of pain on top of everything else which I'd like to avoid if I can. MS _______________________________________________ LinuxUsers mailing list LinuxUsers@socallinux.org http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers
