Lantronix Xport Direct - Unix development environment

Hmm, but what about those $10 USB serial ports? I can't believe they wouldn't support at least some of them. I am not a Solaris guy but here's some info:

You can put quite a few of them, and they should work unless your hardware is doing something tricky like stealing power from the serial port.

At least for the simplest usage cases on the XPort modules there's really not much protocol to speak of. Once you open up your TCP socket you just stream bytes to it, and they come out serial on the other end. For our stuff where we use the XPort, we're generally creating an Ethernet emulation of the serial port connector next to it, with an ASCII command interface. On the serial side, you just open up Hyperterminal, start typing, and it works. On the Ethernet side, you just open up a Telnet session, start typing, and it works.

Short answer, you can probably just replace the filehandle for the serial port with a filehandle for the TCP connection and change nothing else. Just watch out for the connection timeout if your application tends to idle.