Serial Port Redirector

Serial communications programs use COM ports but if you need to access this data from TCP/IP network a problem occurs in lack of an adapter of some kind.

Fortunately, there is an alternative under the form of Serial Port Redirector, an application that can create virtual serial ports over the network. This means that the information from the serial device is sent to a remote machine where it can be accessed.

Installing the application is a simple job that can be completed with little effort from the user; during the operation we did not notice any attempts to push third-party software on the system.

The interface is intuitive, with the menus and functions available in the upper part while most of it is reserved for showing the virtual ports created.

Users can easily add either a server or a client virtual port. When no longer useful, these can be removed from the list by using the options in the context menu.

In order to set things up a TCP port is required and in the case of the client port a remote IP is also necessary.

A set of advanced choices allow selecting the protocol to be used, defining the connection parameters (auto-reconnect, keep alive interval) as well as turning on protection of the communication by using the SSL cryptographic protocol.

Serial Port Redirector offers few configuration parameters and these touch on turning on and off the serial ports and the authentication certificates for the client port SSL.

Similar choices are available for the server port SSL, too, only the list of settings is a little larger since there a private key file is necessary besides the certificate. Moreover, the application can load a CA (certification authority) chain file and rely on client authentication details.

Serial Port Redirector is not intended for the average user but for professionals and targets specific computer environments. Working with it, though, is far from being a complicated task.