Hi Elmer,

Before I answer: I have no personal experience with what I'm about to say... It's funny that I haven't been asked that question before, now that you mention it. A lot of the engineers I work with have devices on serial ports -- they're testing embedded software and they use emulators which run off serial ports. Now that I think of it, I can't remember whether any of them are sharing the emulators. A lot of our other users use serial devices such as bar code readers also.

With that said, here goes:

You can access network-server-side resources, such as serial ports on the server, as if they are local. This isn't done very much because there would be a lot of contention. Besides it doesn't fit your scenario <s>.

You generally access *local* resources as if they are *network* resources, Elmer. IOW even if a printer is physically attached to your computer, it looks to Terminal Server as if it is a shared printer on computer somewhere else on the network.

From what I understand, recent versions of Windows Terminal Server do have the ability to "see" serial ports across the network. You have to redirect the local serial port, there is an option on the client to do this. It is probably a fairly recent addition because I have definitely seen third party add-ons offering this ability in the past <s>.

Look for information about "hardware redirection" or "port redirection" in recent WIndows TS material and you'll find out more about this.

HTH,


>L<