This is ser2net, a program for allowing network connections to serial ports or IPMI Serial Over Lan (SOL) connections. See the man page for information about using the program. Note that ser2net supports RFC 2217 (remote control of serial port parameters), but you must have a compliant client. The only one I know if is kermit (http://www.columbia.edu/kermit). ser2net supports making connections to IPMI SOL (serial over LAN) capable systems. This way, if you have a system with SOL, you can use it with programs that speak sockets and avoid having to run a serial cable to the system. It uses OpenIPMI for this, so you have to know how to make an OpenIPMI connection to the remote system. That can be rather complicated, but for a simple example, add a line like: 3022:telnet:0:sol.lan -U <userid> -P <password> <ipmi BMC IP>:115200 Obviously, use the IPMI BMC userid and password here. Depending on your system there are a lot of other options, and configuration of IPMI on the remote system is not for the faint of heart. And also, if you put passwords in the ser2net.conf file, it becomes a security issue and you should make it readable only by the user that runs ser2net. ser2net also supports threading. By default it runs with a single thread but you can add '-t <num threads>' and it will spawn the given number of threads. On modern Linux systems it uses epoll to avoid the "thundering herd" issue, so it should be quite scalable. Also, it runs reconfigurations in a separate thread to avoid a reconfig blocking things up. If you don't want to compile with threads, you can add "--with-pthreads=no" to the configure line. If you want the opposite of ser2net (you want to connect to a "local" serial port device that is really remote) then Cyclades has provided a tool for this at http://www.coker.com.au/cyclades. It is capable of connecting to ser2net using RFC2217. If you check this out from git, you won't have all the configure programs and files, because those are generated. Do: autoreconf -i to generate everything first. Then you can run configure.