How to Make a Solaris 2.5.1 Workstation Support PPP Dial-Up from Windows

Ben Diamond

About six months ago a client asked my team to put one of our Solaris workstations/ftp servers into their facility and remotely manage it. For security reasons, however, they would not grant us access from the Internet through their firewall. Our only option for remote support was direct dial-up, which they did allow and for which they provided the phone line.

My support staff primarily uses Windows 98 or NT workstations on their desktops. The trick to this customer's request was how to easily and reliably enable our Windows PCs to gain full (albeit slow) access to the remote Solaris workstation.

It is easy to get a Solaris 2.5.1 workstation to support a dial-up terminal session. A terminal session enables a remote client (for example, Windows 95/98 running "HyperTerminal") to have a shell into the machine to run command-line programs. However, loading files to and from a remote Sun Sparc is cumbersome through a shell interface. To upload or download large binary files, and even small ASCII files, requires kludgy old utilities like kermit, ymodem, or zmodem. Furthermore, terminal sessions give no access to the easy, intuitive GUIs that OpenWindows, Common Desktop, or other windowing and X Window front-ends give you. Also, you can only run one terminal shell at a time per dial-up connection.

You must establish a TCP/IP connection over the dial-up phone line (as opposed to a regular terminal session) in order to use easier, newer graphical file transfer tools like WSFTP, or even MS Explorer, to run multiple terminal sessions to the same machine at once (multiple telnet sessions), and to get remote graphical control over the Sun Sparc (e.g., rexec - xterm through an X windowing program).