Re: thinknic

["Jason M. Felice" <jfelice@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sean Porterfield wrote:
> 
> "Jason M. Felice" wrote:
> >
> > Sean Porterfield wrote:
> >
> > > Anyone have any luck getting tn5250 on a NIC?  (
> > > http://www.thinknic.com/ )
> > >
> > > I'm thinking about getting some and wondered if it was feasable.
> >
> > We got one, and I've played around with it a bit.  It would require
> > burning a new CD for it to boot from.  This
> > is certainly feasible.  It just a matter of determining what versions of
> > stuff they're using on the CD
> 
> I have my NIC, but haven't done anything to change the config yet.
> 
> FYI, a list of everything on the CD is at
> http://www.thinknic.com/about/gpl.html so you don't have to guess (and
> you can download the iso image of the cd!)

Cool.  Put another notch on my grand ole' TODO list.

> 
> Just to verify - is ncurses 4 required for tn5250, or will it work with
> 5?  And does it need a real xterm?

I haven't tested, really, but I doubt there will be any problems.

There are a number of problems with running it on a fake xterm, but most
of them should be resolvable by messing with termcap/terminfo and
Xdefaults.  It's a lot of little subtleties we depend on.

> 
> Seems that those are the only real problems (other than configuration
> options.)  I was thinking of finding out how they store the TCP/IP and
> printer config and copying the idea to store tn5250 config.  Somehow
> it's on flash.  The version number of the cd is stored somewhere too, so
> to get certain changes, you need to update the version number (I forget
> where I read that now.)

The flash is a file system and it's mounted.  I assume you can just
write a config file there.

I haven't proved the above hypothesis definitively, but when I was
poking around, I noticed some strange mount points or something that
caused me to conclude this was the case.  I didn't think about touching
it, though.

Funny thing - there is an rxvt and a shell on the CD but I can't figure
out a way to start it.  Oh!  I was going to try doing ^] from telnet and
see if I can execute a shell escape from there, but I didn't get around
to it.

-Jay 'Eraserhead' Felice
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