Re: dialin and dialout devices

[knarf@nasim.cube.net (Frank Bartels)]

Thierry Bousch wrote:

> What is braindead and obsolete about this approach?  With mgetty, you're
> only putting into user space things which are best handled by the
> kernel, especially locking.

The locking via uucp-style lockfiles has many advantages. Every user
process is able find out who's currently using the serial port. All the
applications I use with my modem on my sun (mgetty, sendfax, tip,
kermit, ppp, slip, ...) consequently use those lockfiles. If I had
more than one serial device, it would not be possible to receive a fax
with mgetty, for example.

> With the two-devices approach, I could use the standard tools init/getty
> from S. Usher without any change. Also remember that these two devices
> really have different semantics -- have you looked at the source? In fact, I
> would be rather inclined to consider mgetty as being a kludge...

With mgetty and setting ATS0=0 and accepting calls via ATA after a
RING, it is *never* possible that the modem uses a different serial
speed than the serial port is switched to. If the getty doesn't know
anything about a modem (as the standard getty), it is not possible to
initialize the modem after each dialin/dialout. With the standard
getty you are not able to log dialouts, with mgetty I have the dialout
entries in the wtmp with the name of the dialout process in the field
for the hostname. And with setting ATS0=1 the modem will accept calls
even if the machine is not ready to do so. Remeber the stupid DTR
handling of the ATARI hardware during boottime. mgetty will also check
each hour if your modem is still alive.

I am running mgetty on my Sun and on my FreeBSD box without any
problems. Both machines are up 24 hours a day, and I have more than
100 dialins and dialouts a day. Before I switched to mgetty I had
stupid crontab entries for all the functionality mgetty gives me
today without additional effort.

mgetty for MiNT will be released really soon.

Bye,
Knarf
-- 
    Frank Bartels    |      UUCP/ZModem: + 49 89 5469593       | MiNT is
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