For a long time I used an Equinox SST which was a PCI card and a plugboard of (daisy-chain-able up to 128) 16 x RJ-45 serial ports. It was handy in one machine room, usually a Cat-5 RJ-45 cable with a D-connector was all that was needed. Unfortunately the Linux driver seems to have disappeared into the sands of time though it would work with something like SuSE 9.x, maybe 10.x. That is, 2.4 maybe 2.6 kernels, I don't think SuSE mattered but that's what I used. With the driver and hardware installed it would present as a bunch of /dev/ttyQ?? devices. I'd use an xterm workalike 'eterm' which could take a device on the command line and it'd work. I think screen could also work but firing up separate terminal windows for different ports was convenient. And eterm was rather pretty, not sure what happened to it, but you could probably use kermit or cu etc in a pinch with enough magic. I'm curious if anyone still uses this and perhaps got it working with more modern kernels? I believe it's mentioned in the newer kernel build configuration (make xconfig, whatever) but doesn't work. Not a big deal to install an old OS on a spare machine. Or perhaps even in a virtual machine with some sort of device passthru? Never looked into that. No idea where you'd find the hardware but it was a neat device and if you can't find their driver stuff I could send it to you as a tarball tho I think it's still up on whatever Equinox became. Ok here it is I noted it: http://www.connectivity.avocent.com/drivers/superserial/eqnx_4.12d.asp So you'd just login to that machine and fire up windows to access the Equinox/SST serial ports (to answer the remote part of the question.) -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: +1 617-STD-WRLD | 800-THE-WRLD The World: Since 1989 | A Public Information Utility | *oo*