SHERWOOD@AC.DAL.CA (John Sherwood) (04/15/89)
> They have their own funny terminals which talk some strange >multidrop polling protocol to the GEAC over the async line. Bob: Our GEAC allows the asynch terminals to be configured as GLASS-TTY instead of the multi-dropped polling type. This means you can connect a single, dumb ASCII terminal to the GEAC port. Makes for an easy connection to the terminal server, right? Wrong. They neglect such frills as flow control and connection control. We figured out (the hard way) that you can do the following: ) Flow control of data from the GEAC port can be controlled by toggling the DSR line (nobody can explain why this works; not even GEAC). Flow control in the other direction doesn't seem to be possible. ) GEAC will signal a disconnect by dropping DTR for about 2 seconds. After the 2 seconds it will assume it has a new session and start painting screens unless DSR is low. ) The server must signal disconnect to GEAC by sending the ASCII string "END". This has not proved to be bullet-proof and new users sometimes connect into the middle of someone else's session. All this applies to the older 8000 series machines. Our 9000 is in and running, but I haven't had a chance to see if things have improved. If anyone has a better way of doing things, would we ever like to hear it! Cheers John Sherwood Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia