Hello fellow LUGers, Thanks to everyone who has offered help with the "evil software" laptop issue! I have now solved my problem (i.e., accomplished the objective of establishing communication to the management interface on my Nokia D50 DSLAM) using an old-ish laptop I've bought for this purpose from Zippy Laptops in Oceanside, my dad's Win2k, Nokia's Craft Terminal software and some hacks.
But it was NOT a simple matter of just following Nokia's manual instructions like a monkey and expecting it to "do the right thing" automagically (command the NT-derived RAS into establishing a serial PPP connection to the DSLAM), oh no! Trying to follow the standard procedure resulted in nothing more than the Win2k serial PPP "guest" failing to connect to the "host" with no explanation given. After some soldering and cable-making, the following picture had emerged: * Win2k was sending out the ASCII string "CLIENT" instead of the expected PPP LCP packets while trying to connect. Micro$oft simply can't follow conventional standards, so they've invented their own handshake that must take place before the actual PPP session (before LCP) on modem- less PC-to-PC serial connections (which is what Nokia's software uses to connect to the DSLAM's management interface). I can only guess that this invention wasn't present back in NT 4.0, so the older firmware on my DSLAM is unaware of this hack. (I guess they must have added support for it on the DSLAM side when they decided to support Win2k in addition to NT 4.0 on the host software side.) * The serial PPP implementation in the DSLAM's management module (VxWorks AFAICT) has turned out to be reasonably standard and I was successfully able to connect to it using a non-Weendoze free OS (4.3BSD-Quasijarus UNIX on one of my VAXen). Of course that in itself doesn't help with talking SNMP to its undocumented MIB, so the Weendoze app (the only SW we have that knows how to talk to that MIB) was still necessary. Since at this point all that was still needed was the app and not the PPP part, I had looked into wine - I had almost got it running after copying the missing DLLs from Win2k, but then it complained about the SNMP service not running, and I didn't get farther than that on the wine front. The way in which I finally got it running involves passing the serial channel between the Win2k laptop and the DSLAM through the VAX. One serial cable connects the Win2k laptop to one serial port on the VAX, another cable connects a different port to the DSLAM. (VAXen have *lots* of serial ports, usually 8 per card with no real limit on the number of cards.) I've written a program on the VAX that talks the Win2k/XP serial PPP handshake protocol to make the Weendoze side happy (basically wait until the Weendoze machine sends "CLIENT" and respond with "CLIENTSERVER"), and then starts passing the PPP data straight through. Of course it can also easily be outfitted with a sniffer/logger for possible future reverse engineering of the SNMP-based protocol. But now I've got it working and I can configure my DSLAM, yay! MS _______________________________________________ LinuxUsers mailing list LinuxUsers@socallinux.org http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers
