Question: Does your Device Server support multiple socket connection?
Answer: NO, only one connection is possible at any time. The use of the serial port is exclusive: only one host can connect to the Device Server at a time. The reason for this is that the serial port is not meant to be a shared communications media. Unlike, say, USB, it is intended to be used by only one application at a time. Consider this: a regular COM port on the PC can only be opened by one program at a time. In a similar way, the serial port on the Device Server can only be communicated with through a single connection.
Some of our Customers were quick to point out that there are (seemingly) similar devices on the market that support multiple connections. For example, a network print server can handle multiple print jobs at the same time. Our answer is that the print server works as a batch job device: it receives complete jobs from different clients and executes them one by one. This is not what the Device Server does. The Device Server provides a two-way real-time communications between a certain client and a serial device. Both sides can send the data at any time. Had we allowed several connections to be establishedit would have become impossible to determine which data comes from which host, what is the order in which this data is to be output to the serial device and to which of connected hosts the data from the serial device should be sent!
