Those of you handy with a soldering iron may want to build your own cables to interconnect two linux machines. The following cabling diagrams should assist you in this.
Not all NULL modem cables are alike. Many null modem cables do little more than trick your computer into thinking all the appropriate signals are present and swap transmit and receive data. This is ok but means that you must use software flow control (XON/XOFF) which is less efficient than hardware flow control. The following cable provides the best possible signalling between machines and allows you to use hardware (RTS/CTS) flow control.
Pin Name Pin Pin
Tx Data 2 ----------------------------- 3
Rx Data 3 ----------------------------- 2
RTS 4 ----------------------------- 5
CTS 5 ----------------------------- 4
Ground 7 ----------------------------- 7
DTR 20 -\--------------------------- 8
DSR 6 -/
RLSD/DCD 8 ---------------------------/- 20
\- 6 |