RE: flexfax: help on configuring to receive faxes

[Christoph Scheeder <christoph.scheeder@scheeder.de>]

Hi,
Imagine the folowing Situation:
you have an old 14400bps Modem which you use to conect to your ISP and to do Faxes,
know you purchase a new CableModem to get faster internet-connections, but you want
to continue to use the old modem for faxing. 
So you attach the new modem to another serial device, reconfigure your ISP-Software,
It adjusts your link /dev/modem to point to the new device and you wonder why you don't 
get any faxes anymore.....
This is one kind of problems produced by using links to real devices like /dev/modem,
asside locking problems with two programs acessing the same device trough 
different links.
I had both problems a few month ago, and it took me 3 or 4 days to find out what was 
wrong and to find all those misconfigurations and to eliminate them.
Christoph Scheeder

-----Original Message-----
From:	Jay R. Ashworth [SMTP:jra@baylink.com]
Sent:	Wednesday, May 19, 1999 9:54 PM
To:	'flexfax@sgi.com'
Subject:	Re: flexfax: help on configuring to receive faxes

On Wed, May 19, 1999 at 01:45:30PM -0500, Greg Breland wrote:
[ use "/dev/ttyS?" rather than /dev/modem ]
> Can someone explain why this causes problems?  Also, I did not use a
> ttySx device.  I use "cua0" and "cua1".  Is this just a difference
> between Unix flavors?  Which is best to use?  

It's like this: /dev/modem is, at least on RedHat, a symlink to
whatever your modem is connected to.  Since modems don't move much,
pointing stuff to /dev/modem can cause problems when you don't have
_everything_ pointed there, since two different names point to the same
port -- which can cause locking problems.

Now, if you _do_ have a situation where your modem chanegs ports
regularly, I'm beginning to think (as someone who has this problem)
that maybe the work involved in making sure _everything_ points to the
symlink is worth not having to track down _everything_ _everytime_ I
move a modem.  But that's a personal opinion.

In any case, don't use the cua devices, if you're on a 2.0 or better
kernel; they're deprecated and they're going away.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Buy copies of The New Hackers Dictionary.
The Suncoast Freenet            Give them to all your friends.
Tampa Bay, Florida     http://www.ccil.org/jargon/             +1 813 790 7592