bidilink 0.1

Copyright 2003 Lennart Poettering <mzovqvyvax (at) 0pointer (dot) de>

• License
• News
• Overview
• Status
• Documentation
• Requirements
• Installation
• Acknowledgements
• Download

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

News

Version 0.1 released, initial release.

Overview

bidilink is a general purpose Unix tool for linking two bidirectional data streams together. It extends the standard Unix "filter" paradigma to bidrectional streams.

Status

Version 0.1 is more or less stable. Its has the following stream drivers:

• std: - STDIN, STDOUT of the process
• exec:PROGRAM - fork() off a process and use its STDIN and STDOUT
• tty:TTYDEVICE - Open a TTY device (like a serial port) as client
• pty:[PTYNAME] - Allocate a pseudo TTY device as master
• tcp-client:HOSTNAME:PORT - Connect to another or the local host via TCP/IP
• tcp-server:[IPADDRESS:]PORT - Listen on a local port and wait for an incoming connection
• unix-client:SOCKNAME - Connect to a local Unix domain socket
• unix-server:SOCKNAME - Listen on a local Unix domain socket

More drivers are planned, including:

• dsp: - Full duplex audio with OSS (Open Sound System)
• tun: - Raw network access using the TUN subsystem
• tap: - Raw network access using the TAP subsystem

Documentation

Have a look on the man page bidilink(1). (An XSLT capable browser is required)

bidilink may be used in several different ways. Some examples follow.

Forward a serial port of another machine to a local pseudo TTY

bidilink "exec:ssh OTHERMACHINE bidilink tty:/dev/ttyS0" pty:/dev/rmodem

This will create a symbolic link /dev/rmodem to the allocated pseudo TTY device. Point your application to the device to use the forwarded port. This requires that bidilink is installed on both the local machine and the remote machine. The pseudo tty is compatible with pppd or minicom.

Bind a local serial port to a local TCP port

bidilink tty:/dev/ttyS0 tcp-server:4711

Use telnet localhost 4711 to connect to the device

Bind a remote TCP port to a local pseudo TTY

bidilink pty:/dev/rmodem tcp-client:OTHERMACHINE:4711

This may be used as client to the server trick descibed above.

Open a local Unix socket (SOCK_STREAM) to the Internet:

bidilink tcp-server:4711 unix-client:/tmp/.esd/socket

Requirements

A recent Linux distribution. Probably, it is simple to port bidilink to other platforms, but this has not been done yet.

Installation

As this package is made with the GNU autotools you should run ./configure inside the distribution directory for configuring the source tree. After that you should run make for compilation and make install (as root) for installation of bidilink.

Acknowledgements

None so far

Download

The newest release is always available from http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/bidilink/

The current release is 0.1

Get bidilink's development sources from the Subversion repository.