Re: flexfax: Re: Faxgetty interfering with ppp

[Nico Kadel-Garcia <raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu>]

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On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, George Zeigler wrote:

> Hello,
> 	as regular user, I can't dial out with ppp because faxgetty interferes.
>  I have to uncomment my /etc/inittab line, and reboot to connect.  I put my
> /var/log/messages to show what happens when I try to connect to the net.

This is way off. PPP and faxgetty should be referring to the same serial device
name, typically "/dev/modem" on Linux systems and various other names
on SunOS.

This should *NOT* use a different device name for incoming and outgoing
calls: to quote a classical reference,

	Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a split-device to fool getty and
	UUCP into handling the RI serial flag correctly out of my hat!

	Oh, Bullwinkle, that trick never works!

> 	Seems like 100% of the time to me.  As root, I can connect.  root seems
> to overpower faxgetty.  as a regular user, forget it.  I can't get past
> faxgetty.  This makes me wonder if it is a permissions problem.  In any case,
> HylaFax should not be messing around with my ppp.  I mean, like who wrote this
> program anyhow?

*DOWN*, boy. HylaFAX was correctly written to read and lock the device
flags (in /var/lock under Linux) correctly, according to the UUCP
standards that PPP uses. A lot of different PPP implementations exist,
and some of them have wildly out-of-date or incorrect
documentation. Since way the heck before you were involved in this,
the modem lines were owned by user "uucp" and lock files used to
control access: not every modem software has handled this correctly,
but HylaFAX does. It was originally written by Sam Leffler, whose name
is all over the 4.2 and 4.3 BSD source code upon which so much of
modern UNIX is based, and did know what the heck he was doing.

For details on how it really works, hop on over to www.celeste.org and
look around at the work of Celeste Stokely in pulling the
documentation together.

Also, you should *NOT* have to reboot to re-read your /etc/inittab.
Try this instead under Linux:

	/etc/rc.d/init.d/inet restart

> >Well, you can expand ppp-up script with a examination
> >of /dev/ttyS1, too.
> 	In ordinary human language, this means what?  I use kppp from the KDE
> environment.

Teach kppp that the name of the modem is the same as HylaFAX thinks it is,
usually /dev/modem as a symbolic link to /dev/ttyS1 or /dev/ttyS0 to
cooperate with minicom and other Linux based modem programs which default
to /dev/modem.

What OS and HylaFAX version are you running?

			Nico Kadel-Garcia
			Senior Engineer, CIRL 
			Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary
			raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu

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