serial communication via TCP/UDP sockets

Question

In Linux I use kissattach to create an ax.25 interface for serial port communication. With this, I'm able to send/receive Data to/from these ports via UDP/TCP sockets.

Now I need to set up the same thing in Windows 7, is there any similar Program?

Answer 1

If someone is interested.. I didn't find any useful program, so I solved this with a Virtual Machine. From Linux-VM I routed the ax.25 Ethernet packets to VM's Host only adapter and so to Windows PC. Maybe not the best solution, but it worked for me.

Answer 2

After having searched longtime a solution for this problem and after the "death" of the old WinXP NIC drivers (e.g. the Flexnet, the XR32 or the MIXW2 ones), I found actually only the following solutions or "work in progress" : a) The G8PZT XR32 (http://www.g8pzt.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/software/xr32/index.htm ) software, that is an AX25/NetRom/TCPIP well built and powerful NOS. It runs quite well under Win7 64bits and Win8. I succeeded in installing it on Win7 for “telnetting” a remote repeater using the PC soundcard and Direwolf soundmodem software. Practically I have “telnetted” xr32 from a remote machine using Putty, I have logged in xr32 installed on Win7 and I have started a second telnet session of TCP-IP wrapped over radio till the (linux running) repeater. Of course it’s a bit different from a kissattach procedure : there is no real routing. At the moment it’s no more possible – in Win 7 or Win 8 - to do a “one step” telnet (= from whatever tcp –ip address directly till the final radio destination : XR32 has actually no TAP / NIC interface running on 64bits windows, then it can not act as gateway Ethernet/AX25 (still passivle AX25 over TCP and so on). b) the Windows 7 version of the "classic" JNOS2 by Maiko Langelaar, that seems to be able to keep TCP/IP packets from Windows and to redirect them on AGWPE (or kiss) stacks, creating practically almost a JNOS virtual machine in the Windows environment. At the moment Maiko found a cleaver solution of the problem of the missing NIC driver, but there still are some problems (on JNOS side not on the Windows one, strange...) that prevents any TCP/IP over radio connection from inside JNOS2 and consequently the routing.

I'm also evaluating the possibility to try to develop a driver by myself, using the OpenVPN TAP driver as basis. It's indeed quite boring having no possibility of redirecting TCP/IP directly over AX25 in Windows 64bits, when it was easy to do with Win95 about 15 years ago...

Answer 3

If someone is interested, I finally found - as unique solution - the one proposed by Cittles : the NOS are actually not yet ready for Win7... Just for summarizing the main proceeding, working on my Windows7 64bits machine, I followed these steps : a) Installing QEMU for 64bits : easy to do following the QEMU instructions b) Installing Debian for AMD64 on QEMU, following mainly the procedure shown on the QEMU website. I choose to install Wheezy (last stable Debian version). c) Installed the OpenVPN TAP driver (only the TAP driver !) on Windows7 64bits and followed the "RaspberryPI on QEMU" instructions in order to give a fully functional network interface to the emulated Debian on QEMU. A partially different approach can be found in the "Debian over QEMU" documentation on the QEMU website) d) Installing and configuring Direwolf on Windows (ports, PTT connection...) e) Installing SOCAT on the emulated Debian (really easy : apt-get...) f) Installing AX25 on the emulated Debian (really easy : apt-get libax25 ax25-tools : no "building" required). Please remember to load the AX25 and MKISS kernal modules in Debian (e.g. /etc/modules) g) Creating a SOCAT connection between the emulated Debian (virtual PTS terminal) and the 8001 "kiss" port of Direwolf on Windows h) Using KISSATTACH (see Direwolf user manual) for creating the AX25 network interface in Debian i) Finally use the IPTABLE tool to activate the NAT interface in Debian, in order to route correctly the TCP-IP packets over AX25. Of course Debian will run as gateway between "wired" network and RF. It’s now time to add the route 44.0.0.0/8 to to each machine that should send IP packets to Direwolf. After done this, any ping, telnet, ssh or also FTP (!) connection request started from whatever network machine will be sent immediately to Direwolf and RF. I have not yet tested extensively performances and % of packet lost in this nice "old style" game.

Answer 4

There is also a good "all in Windows" solution. The BPQ32 NOS it's a very good "modern" NOS layer, able to speak with all "modern" soundmodem software including FLDIGI and WinMOR). The software - fantastically maintained by its creator, John Wiseman, runs also on Win7 64bits. It is also able to manage a parallel IP socket (using WinPCAP) and re-routing packet coming from TCP-IP networks on radio interfaces. As no NAT has been developed, the routing process is made at ARP level, with some limits.