I have a weekness for anything that communicates via RS-232 Serial. This is probably due to most of my youth days being in front of a computer connected via modem to the world.
Occasionally I like to access Telnet BBS to re-live my youth. Telnet works fine, but once you want to start doing file transfers, etc., it quickly becomes limited.
Enter “modemu”.
ModemU adds Telnet capability to a comm program by redirecting Telnet I/O to a PTY. Basically, the Communications Program doesn’t really have any clue that it’s not a serial port.
You can get ModemU from Good ‘ol Sunsite by clicking here.
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/linux/apps/serialcomm/dialout/modemu-0.0.1.tar.gz
It compiled just fine on my Ubuntu 9.04 workstation after installing flex. Once compiled, you can use it as a stand-alone client, which doesn’t serve much purpose, if you ask me.
However, this is the way I used it with minicom:
$ modemu -c “minicom -p %s”
This should work with other communications program, as long as you can pass in the port to use. ModemU, after creating the virtual PTY, passes in the PTY # to the command specified via the %s variable substitution.
Tada!
Once in minicom, you can do the following to connect to your favorite telnet systems:
atd”hostname
CONNECT
Welcome to….
To disconnect, once you exit your system, you will receive a “NO CARRIER” message. Then, you can exit with at%q, or exit with your communications program.
* Main * 0:00:03 [2] DOVE-Net [1] General: /O
NO CARRIER
at%q
There you have it. Simple Telnet<->Modem Emulation in Linux. This should also work on other UNIXes, but your milage my vary.
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