Hello Jorge, Tuesday, January 14, 2003, 6:02:14 AM CET, you wrote:
JAS> These terminals are now supposed to be able to have Bar Code Readers JAS> attached to the serial ports of the machines !! JAS> If I cannot do this with LTSP I am going to be forced to GO Full Linux JAS> on the Desktop machines on the floor or worse Yet Install M$ on them !!! JAS> How can I accomplish this ? I have been reading about mice and serially JAS> attached "Touch devices" & Printers but there is no mention anywhere of JAS> any other serially attached devices. I'm sure it is possible. Mostly, these bar code scanner devices will just send the bytes they read in (and a start "*" and stop "#" or so, for some models ?)... So they don't need bidirectional communications which eases the problem a lot. You could inform yourself about "mserver" (sometimes referred to as "modemserver") which usually has the task to export a serial port via network, so that other machines (M$Win as well as Linux) can mount that port as "local". You will run into a problem probably, that is: When there are three terminals with a barcode scanner each, and users aaron, bob and carmen scanning parts, how will the server know (because that's where the programs are executed if they are not local_apps) which serial port to connect to which user? If it was my project, I probably would try to run it like this (rough thoughts only :-) Create /var/barcode, and one fifo-endpoint with the name of each user that uses the scanner (Permissions as restrictive as possible, best 0400). Program a small server app that accepts udp packages from only the IP addresses of terminals (security, be sure noone can hang into your net then it's at least safer than the keyboard-barcode-method). On each terminal, run a daemon that sends any serial input to that daemon. Then, get your server's window manager write every login to a file (so that the daemon can lookup where a user is logged in; works only if no user is logged in twice! activate 'autologout'?) and for every incoming package, let the daemon look up what user it comes from and write to that fifo. JAS> I am guessing that I am touching on a whole new subject here but I hope JAS> I am wrong and somebody out there has been able to do this ... JAS> I am guessing this would be along the lines of ltsp_nbd ... JAS> (currently used for Terminal floppy access) nbd stands for "network block devices". Serial ports are usually "character devices". JAS> Thanks a Bunch. JAS> Adrian Salaices. JAS> Applications Manager/DBA JAS> Dallas Airmotive. JAS> mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Just some cents from here. If I did not have so lots of 'open' projects on my todo lists, phew! I liked to scribble down something :-) Best regards, Anselm mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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