During development and testing of embedded systems, the serial port is used for communicating with the host. This applies to firmware based embedded systems or Linux based embedded systems. But laptops and desktops today generally do not have a serial port. At Zilogic, we hit on this problem every time we go out for a corporate training.

One solution is to use a USB-to-Serial converter. But our experience shows that the USB-to-Serial converters available in the market are hardly reliable. Fed up with the USB-to-Serial converters we decided to develop our own Remote Terminal Server, which makes the serial port available over the network.

This article describes how to build a simple 4-port Remote Terminal Server, using a Linux and various other open source tools. We hope this also serves to show how a product can be built using Linux and other Free and Open Source software components.