Re: [hylafax-users] Trouble Setting up multiple modems on RedHat 7.0

[Lee Howard <faxguy@deanox.com>]

At 06:42 PM 12/12/00 -0500, Douglas Younger wrote:
>Hello,
>   I am trying to set up a fax server machine with four internal PCI 
>modems. I have USR/3Com 3CP5610A modems which are not winmodems.

You are very much correct, it is not a winmodem.  AFAIK, there are three
chipsets that control hardware-based PCI modems: USR/TI Kermit (as on the
3CP5610), Lucent Venus, and Topic TP560i.  I have only ever used the USR
one as I have not been able to find any of the other two.  For an internal
modem, and if you don't mind the nuances of USR fax firmware, the 3CP5610A
is a very good modem.  I've used many of them.  With many new motherboards
coming out with PCI-only options, PCI is the only means of internalizing a
modem, although I will side with Jay's opinion about multi-modem systems
preferring external units.  I've *never* had to reboot my single-fax
systems, though (all internal modems), due to fax problems.

> I tried at 
>first to just get one modem set up, and using the standard kernel supplied 
>with RH7.0 (2.2.16 & patches), I was having no luck at all. I also tried to 
>compile 2.2.17 (which is a feat in and of itself with RedHat shipping a 
>beta gcc that won't compile kernels), and was still unable to access the 
>modem.  So, I got the 2.4.0-test12 which is the latest beta kernel (the 
>modem box says you need 2.3.x or better, which is funny, because 2.2.x is 
>the current "stable" revision). Anyway, I finally got a modem setup & 
>communicating with minicom. So, I put in the other 3 to see if I could 
>configure them. Well no luck. I seem to get a whole lot of resource 
>conflicts in the boot sequence. Looking at /proc/pci it only listed 2 of 
>the modems, And /etc/sysconfig/hwconf (from kudzu) lists 3 ?!? I tried 
>dropping to only 2 modems and I still get conflicts. With more than 1 
>modem, I can't access any of them.

These modems *do not* require kernel 2.3.x or greater.  I've run them with
most of the 2.2.x flavours and have yet to use any 2.3.x or 2.4.x kernel.
RedHat does a lot of interesting things with kudzu and isapnp during boot,
and I'm not sure what they've done in 7.0 to make PCI modems work in a
plug-n-play fashion, but it's not doing anything more than using kudzu,
isapnp, and setserial.  I like RedHat, but the two aspects of the
distribution that I dislike most are linuxconf and kudzu.  I've had more
trouble because of those two things making unseen and unasked-for changes
on their own...  Anyway, the essence of setting up a hardware PCI modem is
setserial.  For example, in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit I have the following line
at the top:

/bin/setserial /dev/ttyS2 uart 16550A port 0xb800 irq 9

read the setserial manpage for better info on how do do this.  You need to
make sure, though, that the setserial command is run *before* the serial
port is accessed by the HylaFAX daemon (so rc.local comes too late).

As for your kernel compilation issues with gcc... I believe that the
official verdict is that the bugs are in the kernel source and not in the
compiler.  Apparently gcc is significantly more stringent about syntax and
code structure than kgcc or egcs are.  But yes, it is beta, yet it compiles
HylaFAX source just dandy.

As for not having enough manageable IRQs to accomplish your desires, well,
you and your motherboard will need to argue about that.  Don't expect any
sympathy from Dell, though.

If you dont have any ISA slots, and if you are interested in using external
modems, you may be interested in some multi-port PCI I/O cards like the one
at:

http://www.siig.com/io/pci_serial_8000_plus.php

I installed one of these the other day in a Windows system, and it went
very well.  It doesn't say anything about Linux compatiblity, but it does
say that they are DOS compatible, so I suppose that is a good sign for
Linux-use, but I didn't have the time to test it on a Linux system.  I
still imagine that a hefty use of setserial would be needed with such a
device.

Lee Howard.



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