Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!f.word.cs.cmu.edu!eht
From: eht@f.word.cs.cmu.edu (Eric Thayer)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: modems (good/bad)
Message-ID: <5863@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 15 Aug 89 21:40:25 GMT
References: <1075@adobe.UUCP>
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 26

After spending some time working on uucp here, you might want to make sure
your modem is connected to the Serial A port if you are going to be doing
both dial in and dial out.  The reason being is that Serial A is the only
one which supports carrier detection.  Also, along these lines, you will
want a cable that takes carrier detect from your modem to pin 7 of the
Serial A connector. (Thus, a Mac cable won't do if you want modem control.
For just dial out, a Mac cable would work fine on Serial B).

Aside from these things, we've found that it was possible for getty to think
that the serial port was in use, when in reality nobody was using the port.
I called up NeXT support on this one and they told me that this was
a known bug under 0.9.  One grotesque way of getting around this one was to
craft a script which attempted to see if anyone had dialed out/in and if not,
kill and restart the getty associated with the serial port.  This cleared out
the pending open that getty had and allowed the serial port to function
properly for a while.

Aside from these things, using the -x9 arg and being able to look at some uucp
sources helped me out tremendously.   The sources were very useful in tracking
down modem config problems because I then could figure out what the dialer
was doing.

Hope this helps some harried individuals out there.
-- 
Eric H. Thayer      School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
(412) 268-7679      5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213