TTYBUS project. Copyright (c) 2010 Daniele Lacamera <[email protected]>. 


OVERVIEW
TTYBUS project is a toolkit that provides tty device virtualization, multiplexing, spoofing and sharing among unix processes.
It allows user to connect her real and virtual terminals (including real serial devices) to a shared, non-reliable bus, and
then to virtually any input/output stream.


LICENSE
TTYBUS comes without any warranty and it is released under the terms of the GNU/GPL v.2

IDEA
TTYBUS steals the architecture concept from VDE (Virtual Distributed Ethernet) design.
The working scheme is quite simple: user can connect her ttys together in a virtual bus, then all the data sent and received
from any of the devices connected to the virtual bus is echoed to all other devices. 

This includes real and virtual tty devices, with the possibility to create fake devices using posix pseudo-terminals.


COMPONENTS

tty_bus 
Creates a new tty bus running on the system, at a given bus path specified with the -s option. The command creates the bus 
and exposes a unix socket at the given path. Once the path has been created, any device can be plugged in using the other 
toolkit's commands.

tty_plug
Connects STDIN/STDOUT of the current terminal to the tty_bus specified with the -s option.
Eventually the -i option can be specified to add an init string to be passed to process stdout before it's connected
to the tty bus.

tty_fake 
Creates a new pseudo-terminal devices connected to the tty_bus specified with the -s option. If the given path for the fake
device already exists, tty_fake can be forced to replace it with the -o option.

tty_attach
Open a real (existing) tty and connects it to the tty_bus specified with the -s option.
Eventually the -i option can be specified to add an init string to be passed to the real tty device before it's connected
to the tty bus.

dpipe
Stolen from the VDE project, allows two unix processes to communicate each-other by attaching each process' stdout stream to
the other one's stdin.

Please refer to each command's manpage for detailed usage notes.


EXAMPLES

Use case 1: Multiplexing serial input only or output only device attached to /dev/ttyS0, for use with multiple applications.
- step 1: create a new tty bus called /tmp/ttyS0mux:

	tty_bus -s /tmp/ttyS0mux

- step 2: connect the real device to the bus using tty_attach:
	
	tty_attach -s /tmp/ttyS0mux /dev/ttyS0

- step 3: create 2 fake ttyS0 devices, attached to the bus:

	tty_fake -s /tmp/ttyS0mux /dev/ttyS0fake0
	tty_fake -s /tmp/ttyS0mux /dev/ttyS0fake1

- step 4: start your application and force it to use the new serial device for input or output
	
	/bin/foo /dev/ttyS0fake0 &
	/bin/bar /dev/ttyS0fake1 &

UBoth application will read (or write) from the same serial device. CAUTION: all data written on each of the two fake devices
will be echoed on the other one too.


Use case 2: create fake NMEA devices from your running gpsd daemon.

- step 1: create the bus:
	
	tty_bus -s /tmp/gpsmux

- step 2: use dpipe, tty_plug and netcat to connect tcp socket to gpsd daemon. Send 'r' as init string to get NMEA flow from
  the socket:

	dpipe tty_plug -s /tmp/gpsmux -i "r"  = nc -c ip.address.of.gpsd 2947

- step 3: create a fake gps device 

	tty_fake -s /tmp/gpsmux /dev/gps0

- step 4: connect your legacy serial, non gpsd-compatible, nmea application to the fake device /dev/gps0

	/usr/local/games/stupid_nmea_app /dev/gps0


Use case 3: remote serial device via SSH tunnel. Host 'mars' has a serial device connected on /dev/ttyUSB0, which must be 
accessed and used from host 'venus'.

- step 1: create two tty_bus, one per machine.
	
	mars:$ tty_bus -s /tmp/exported_ttybus
	venus:$ tty_bus -s /tmp/remote_ttybus 

- step 2: on mars, attach the device to the local bus:
	
	mars:$ tty_attach -s /tmp/exported_ttybus /dev/ttyUSB0

- step 3: on venus, prepare the fake tty device, on the same path, temporarly overriding the local ttyUSB0 device:

	venus:$ tty_fake -s /tmp/remote_ttybus -o /dev/ttyUSB0

- step 4: connect the two buses on the two hosts, using remote ssh command and tty_plug:

	venus:$ dpipe tty_plug -s /tmp/remote_ttybus = ssh mars tty_plug -s /tmp/exported_ttybus 


From now on, the /dev/ttyUSB0 on venus is actually the device connected on mars. If it existed before being ovverridden,
the original /dev/ttyUSB0 is restored once the tty_fake process on venus gets killed.