Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

We recently had to connect a distributed, legacy system using RS232 to a modern network. One of the main ideas behind it was to centralize it – but this can be rather difficult when talking about RS232 in a variety of locations. We looked around, and found a company that made what we were looking for.

Moxa sells many embedded adapters, we bought the cheapest one, the NPort 5110. In Switzerland, these can be bought from Disdata, and cost about 160 CHF.

The good thing about those devices is that they support real COM operations mode on Windows Server 2003, Vista in both x32 and x64 editions. Many other companies do not yet offer x64 drivers or Vista support.

Without reading any manuals, these thingies were up and running in 10 minutes – this is quite good. A few years ago i’ve worked on a similar problem, and i don’t even remember what product we used – i just know that it wasn’t as easy as it was today.