pscp w serial port: host does not exist

[sonettguy]

First, my apology for opening another topic on an age-old question. But, I have read dozens of posts on the "host does not exist" error with folks trying to move a file from PC to pi, I have followed links to dozens of sites explaining how to do this over the internet, and I am more confused than when I began.

First question. Can I use pscp over a serial communications link from PC to pi?

Here is what I'm doing. I have a UART serial link using a USB to TTL Serial Cable from Adafruit. I use PuTTY on my PC and establish a connection with my pi zero (running Raspbian Stretch). I get the proper prompt in the PuTTY console.

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pi@myhostname:~$

I test the connection with various commands and it works fine. I open the Command Prompt console on my PC running Windows 10. At the prompt, I try type pscp and get the Release 0.70, Usage and Options. I type the following.

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c:\Users\myusername>pscp -ls pi@myhostname:.
ssh_init: Host does not exist

I read somewhere in the 30th post I've read that one must generate a key first, so in the PuTTY console I type...

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ssh-keygen -t rsa
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
<goes on to successfully create a key>

I retry the previous command with the same result; host does not exist.

Second question. If the answer to the first question is yes, am I missing something when I use the hostname pi@myhostname: inserting my actual hostname in place of myhostname, of course.

All of the examples I find in articles, posts and websites seem to use ".com" examples.

[topguy]

First question. Can I use pscp over a serial communications link from PC to pi?

No, not if the serial link is used to access the console directly.

For SCP to work there has to be a network connection between the Pi and the PC. Putty "cheats" because its a terminal program and can use serial port in addition to SSH prototocol. PSCP can only use SSH protocol which is a network/TCP-IP protocol.

Can you run TCP/IP over a serial line ? ... yes but its a bit complicated:
Example: https://www.instructables.com/id/Connec ... sing-UART/


In general the "host does not exist" is a symptom that the host-name can not be translated to an IP-address. Networking doesnt use hostnames they only use ip-adresses so there has to be a way to translate the name to an IP-address.