I need to build a staging environment to migrate a legacy system that uses Windows and RS232 ports on both sides of the interaction. Our staging environment would be virtualized and have no physical serial ports. I'm looking for a way emulate/tunnel/emulate the RS232 data over TCP/IP without using converter boxes.
The originating sends TAP that would normally be sent to a paging encoder. The receiving system understands this as RS232 inbound. In the old days one would have put the equipment next to each other or used a short-haul modem to do this. I've also successfully done this type of application with one side having a physical serial port connected to an RS232-->TCP/IP convert box (e.g. Digiport or Lantronix) pointed at a Windows machine that has an RS232 software redirector on it.
I'm wondering if there's a way to reliably do the whole thing just in software? and what software would be the best to use. This is a commercial application, so I'm happy to purchase the right application(s) to make this work.
