[BusyBox] Busybox, floppyfw and backup fw with heartbeat (incl ip and serial ping)

[Lars Kristensson]

Hello,
this is a twosided question, I've asked it to floppyfw people 
(http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/) as well.

I know that floppyfw is using a somewhat stripped down version of bb but 
I'm not sure exactly how much.
I'm working on a solution with dual firewalls where the "slave" kicks in 
when the "master" is dead and vv. I know there are projects like 
linux-ha but i like floppyfw for it's minimalistic approach, everthing 
on a floppy and no daemons. I've got an ethernet ping/heartbeat working 
really well, and now I'm trying to make a serial as well. Maybe someone 
in the floppyfw/bb community already has done something similar? Then I 
would really like to know. One path I'm looking at is to use simple 
scripts, where the currently active fw is echo'ing to it's serial port 
and the standby fw is read'ing. I haven't found what options are 
availale to the read command and I've tried a few. It is obviously a 
builtin command and all the help says is
$ read
read: arg count
What i really would like is the "-t sec" option (timeout) but it's not 
there. Other possibilities are using cat < /dev/ttyS0 but i still need 
some solid form of timeout.  Any ideas anyone?
If anyone thinks this project is interesting, or redundant(!), please 
contact me and/or answer here.

/Lakris