I started using Lantronix years ago, because I bought their development kit first and also because of the small size of the XPort. I built up this complex scheme of writing the setup records over the serial port (since the customer dictated that setup NOT be allowed over Ethernet). The first board (18F8720 + XPort) started out as telnet only, but I just kept adding capability. First UDP then SNMP. The SNMP part was the hardest, because - while the most devices claim to support SNMP, they mean that the device itself terminates the SNMP request. That doesn't work for me, because I needed to support SNMP reading *MY* sensors. So the XPort has to become a UDP tunnel and I have to process the SNMP packets and OIDs in my code - not trivial! I also must send SNMP traps upon errors.

Later on, I needed SNMP and SSH/SSL simultaneously, so I used the Lantronix MatchPort AR. It handles the encryption. But setting up that device is not easy either - it uses XML records!

The biggest challenge was finding devices that allowed relatively easy configuration and setup over the SERIAL port, and yet blocked all attempts to configure through Ethernet (and would't even respond to pings). Military protocols demand that. All the serial<->Lan people want to impress me with the easy setup over Ethernet using a GUI. I tell them that is the exact opposite of what I need!

Like so many other cases - I'm so far down the road with Lantronix, it would be hard to switch now.