[geeks] Q: NetScreen Firewall/VPN appliance

[Doug McLaren]

On Tue, May 22, 2007 at 06:06:32PM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:

| I'll give it a shot - I picked up a neat null modem cable on a
| closeout shelf recently, and I've wanted to try it out - it has 9 and
| 25 pin connectors on each end, and from one end to the other is
| crossed over...

Sounds like a laplink cable.

Depending on the exact version, laplink could come with a parallel to
parallel cable and/or a serial cable.  The serial cable was a null
modem cable, and sometimes had both 9 and 25 pin connectors.

The parallel cable was good for moving files between PCs at a
reasonable clip (compared to the serial port, anyways -- about 250
KB/s if I remember right) either with laplink or similar things or
PLIP (on Linux) and you didn't even need ethernet, but the serial
cables were pretty much universal null modems.  All you need is a few
gender changers, and you could connect anything to anything.

And best of all, they show up at garages sales occasionally.

-- 
Doug McLaren, dougmc at frenzied.us
Communicating with aliens via the `fire' button