While sitting downstairs chatting on IRC through my serial terminal, I thought it’d be great if I could also chat to people on Google Talk through it. I had a quick search of the web and came across Bitlbee:

BitlBee brings IM (instant messaging) to IRC clients. It’s a great solution for people who have an IRC client running all the time and don’t want to run an additional MSN/AIM/whatever client.

Just install the program and connect to the BitlBee server with your favourite IRC-client. You will be force-joined into the control channel where root (the bot, your assistant, the bee) will try to help you to get the program working.

A quick apt-get install bitlbee soon had it installed, and after working out I had to type /server +localhost into IRSSI I had a new channel open with me and the ‘root’ user. Telling the bee about Google Talk seemed fairly simple, but it didn’t want to connect, giving an error with the unhelpful “Connection Closed” message. A bit of searching came across a post that had some helpful wisdom on it:

account add jabber username@gmail.com mypasswd talk.google.com:5223:ssl

The important bit being :5223:ssl added to the end of the server string. Bitlbee now connects perfectly and I’ve been chatting away to my GTalk contacts as though they were on IRC.

I spent a few hours this evening perfecting my soldering skills. I’ve created two ‘Y’ cables that split Cat5 cable into both ethernet and serial comms. I have one end plugged into my server and the other end is currently in my office. Between the two locations is the normal Cat5 wiring with no modifications. The serial connection is removed before the cable hits the switch and nobody notices.

Once I’ve tidied it all up I’ll do a writeup. I’m also trying to connect my Mac Classic to the rest of my house using a serial cable. Cleverly I’ve made a Mini-DIN 8 to DB9 cable and wired it backwards. It spews junk to my terminal and that’s about it. I’ll be fixing that tomorrow then.

I came across a really interesting hack to power, control and run a wireless access point, all from one piece of Cat5 cable. It relies on the way 100 meg ethernet only uses two pairs in the cable, leaving two other pairs unused (a fact exploited by some network admins who need to run more machines than they have cable runs for by using a splitter).

I don’t have a wireless access point on my roof that needs power, serial and data comms. However it got me thinking. Currently my serial terminal is sat on a table next to my server, which is a bit pointless. It’d be much more useful downstairs. I don’t want to run a long serial cable around my house though, the place has enough wire creatively hidden as it is.

So what I plan on doing is creating two ’splitter’ boxes; one end will have a standard RJ45 socket for a long piece of ethernet cable, the other end will have a short ethernet cable with plug, and a short serial cable with plug. Two of these devices, one on each end of a regular ethernet cable, will allow me to squirt serial and ethernet down a single cable run.

I’ll have to use software flow control though, and probably lower the baud rate to overcome any interference, but it should be good enough for a text terminal. If it works, I may build another pair to send serial comms into my office to hook my A1500 up to my server for file transfers.

I have made my WYSE serial terminal work with my Linux server. After yesterday’s confusion and frustration I went back to Maplin and bought a few things that made the task very simple. I bought a properly wired DB9-DB9 null modem cable, a DB9 gender changer and a DB9-DB25 adapter.

All it took was for me to connect the DB9 serial cable to the second serial port of the terminal, plug the other end into my server and run a getty. This is how easy it should have been yesterday, but it seems I was using a wire not designed for connecting between PCs and the terminal. God knows what it’s for, but it didn’t work.

I’ve written up a small Drupal book about my method to make this work. Read it here.

I have in my posession an Amiga 500, Amiga 1500, WYSE terminal and a Mac Classic.

Today I learned several things:

• PCs running XP can’t read 720k floppies
• Serial communications is still just as confusing as it used to be
• Old hardware doesn’t work like you’d expect
• Given the choice between soldering small, fiddly things yourself, or paying  £5 for someone to do it for you, choose the £5 option

One of my aims today was to get my A1500 reading floppy disks, since originally all that happened was an intense squeaking/grating noise would come out the drive, and the computer would have a bit of a fit and complain the disk wasn’t working properly. This was solved, after much faff, by swapping a diskdrive from the A500 and putting it in the A1500. Seems the drives are the same, apart from the fronts of them.

The original diskdrive in the A1500 was quite damaged, either years of fluff and dust had stuck to the read heads, or they were mis-aligned. Either way any disk put into the drive was instantly rendered a dead disk, and received a neat scratch near the edge that went right through the magnetic layer.

PCs won’t read 720k disks any more, so that makes it hard to copy disk images into the Amiga to write them to floppies. After all, writing Amiga floppies on a PC would just be too simple now, wouldn’t it.

The idea with the serial terminal was to hook it up to my Linux machine. This - obviously - meant I had to go out and buy a USB-Serial dongle for my Linux machine, modern PCs having between zero and one serial ports now. Despite being a no-brand one from Maplin, the Linux machine worked out what it was and said it was called ttyUSB0. Now all I had to do was run a getty and connect the serial cable up.

And this is where the trouble began. The cable I have is a null modem cable, with a male DB25 connector on one end, and a male DB9 connector on the other. PC serial ports are also male DB9 connectors.

In Maplin I saw a DB9 Female-Female gender changer, but it was a fiver and at home I have several female DB9 connectors of my own. Surely it’s not hard to make a genderchanger by hand. Yeah, right… whatever. Soldering to those connectors is hard, especially when nobody seems to provide pinouts of gender changers. Do the pins go straight through, as if the two connectors are soldered back-to-back, or do all the pins cross over? I tried both ways and the best I could get was a bit of random garbage in Minicom.

The rest of the day had me trying various cables I own, all of which look like null modem leads, and none of which worked. I will go to Maplin again tomorrow and get a collection of gender changers and serial cables. I want to hook my A1500 up to my PC to transfer files in addition to making this terminal work.

For a test I plugged my GPS into the terminal and after setting the comms parameters, was greeted with NMEA text shooting up the screen.

So, the next time you complain it’s hard making a USB device work, or that it’s such a pain having to install a driver disk, just remember what it used to be like. Is it 19200,8,N,1 or is it 115200,8,N,1? XON/XOFF or RTS/CTS or both? Or neither? And what serial port are you plugged into? And it takes so long transferring files at multi-megabit speeds doesn’t it.