i am trying to get a digi portserver ts 8 mei that we’ve had laying around talking correctly over an rs232 line. it was preconfigured to work on another project via an expect script which i have access to. from what i see, it looks like it should work, but i can’t get everything to run.
right now, i’m running on Ubuntu 12.04. i was able to take the latest release of the digi drivers for Linux and upgrade them so that they would work in the latest release of Ubuntu (digi is welcome to have my work if they want it. i tried emailing one of the email addresses in the source file, but it kicked back. anyway, i’ve already done the work for you…). obviously, i’m trying to make use of realport.
i have been able to assign an IP to the porserver, get it added via dgrp_gui, and start the daemon. i can telnet to the portserver and everything.
i connected one of our serial devices to the first port, and i’m not getting any data to the port via the converted rs232 serial line (i know for a fact that the line is feeding data). if i echo out to /dev/tty100 in linux, i can use the web interface to see the number of “Total Data Out” bytes getting incremented, while the number of “Total Data In” bytes is sitting at 0. i have noticed that the framing errors is high too.
anyone have any suggestion on why i can’t see the serial traffic on my linux box (listening to /dev/tty100)? when i fire up wireshark, i can see that the porsterver is sending out tcp packets to me, and i’m replying (ack), but there is no data in the packets.
any suggestions? would be nice if this would work easy. we’ll probably buy 50 or so if we can get it working.
First, let me say that after 25 years of this ‘serial stuff’, 95% of the time a problem which sounds like yours is cabling, and ALWAYS the customer swears that they know it is NOT a cabling problem. Three times I have been flow remotely at thousands of $$ of cost just to use a volt-meter and show the customer that what they insisted could not be true is indeed true: Cabling Problem.
The RJ45 used on the TS8 makes it all the worse, as the wires are small and it is easy to wire things backwards (which end is pin#1? I still struggle with that every time I touch one of Digi’s RJ45 serial ports!)
Framing errors usually mean:
a baud rate issue
floating wires, including a case where TX is tied to TX and RX to RX (which means any data received is via capacitive coupling.)
severe line noise (bad sheilding, grounding, or cable route).
The Data Out means nothing - the TS8 send data to the UART, but that doesn’t mean any external RS-232 device saw it.
The Data In merely means enough wire transitions were seen to mimic Start and Stop bits without a framing error.
I would suggest:
try to make sense of the control signals like DTR/DSR - even your device doesn’t supprot them, looping DTR/DSR togather at the remote end of your cable will allow 1 easy check - unplugging your cable when RealPort is active should cause DTR to be high but DSR to drop. If it doesn’t, you may be misunderstanding the Rj45 wires.
also take a voltage meter and with more the TS8 and your device powered on and NOTHING TALKING, confirm both the TX and RX lines are between -5 and -12vdc. If the RX signal is close to 0v, then you have your TX linked to TX and your two RX lines linked togather.
when you talk via RealPort, with a volt meter you should also see the idle voltage of -5 to -12vdc ‘wiggle’ the meter - generally the meter won’t show the +5 to +12vdc, but you shoudl see the number change (for example from -5.5 to -5.0 then back to -5.5). This is because the meters average the signal and don’t see the +5 voltage long enough to actually show it to you.