I would also recommend tip for connecting to the serial port ... 

On Wed, Nov 24, 2004 at 11:32:10PM -0500, Alex Dumitriu wrote:
|For all-out serial management, you could step up again to conserver,
|also in pkgsrc/comms. Conserver will run as a daemon and can log output
|whether you're looking or not. It can also allow multiple viewers to
|see the same serial output in multiple windows at the same time. This
|is probably overkill for your needs.

rather than conserver I would suggest using script (man script) and then
starting tip from there - script will produce a file (called typescript)
with all of the session data, both incoming and outgoing)

If you want to get even more fancy I would suggest running tip from
within screen. Screen is traditionally used to manage a set of running
shells from the one terminal connection. It doesn't have to run shells
though - I use it to concentrate my serial consoles here by starting it
with a tip sessions in each screen, one per host. I can then switch to
any console just as I would on a KVM (well, you get what I mean)

screen is capable of logging all data to a file (as with script) however
it also allows you to detach from a session and logout, then login later
and reattach without killing whatever you have running whilst you were
away - very very handy for this application in particular.

screen has been accused of being the Unix equivalent of the swiss-army
chainsaw, and even seasoned users find new things to do with it each
time they look at the manual page ... but although the manual entry
is large, you really only need a few commands in order to use it
effectively (I won't spell them out here, email me if you are interested)

Hope that helps,
Malcolm

-- 
Malcolm Herbert                                    System Administrator
ph [990] 54881 rm 28-241                          School of GeoSciences