Hello.
I have a crazy question in 2024.
I have multiple devices connected to the same RS-485 bus using the serial ports.
I need to create a network over that rs485 bus and I am thinking on enabling the PPP Server on one device and PPP clients on the others over the serial ports.
Is this the best option?
What is your opinion?
PPP stands for Point-to-Point Protocol, which gives a hint that it does not include any support for Point-to-Multipoint channels, i.e. it does not contain any Media Access Control address allowing to indicate for which of the devices on the RS485 bus the packet is intended, or from which of them it has arrived. I don’t think it should be a big deal for a skilled kernel programmer to add some kind of adaptation layer allowing to create a virtual serial interface per each “client” device on the “server” side, but it would require modification of the PPP software on both the server and the clients. So Mikrotik is not the tool of choice here. The data-channel parameter of /ppp server indicates which channel of a multi-port USB device to use, not a bus level address of the client, if that’s what has induced the false hope in you.