serial port modem in VL 5.8 [SOLVED]

[lagagnon]

I'm wondering if the serial port is damaged on this PC.

But you said above that the modem worked with other distros. Did it work with other distros on this same machine? What do you see with the command:

Code:

dmesg | grep serial

[Trio3b]

Please explain how to use  tail -f

dmesg | grep serial output:

serial8250 ttyS0 at I/O ox3f8 (IRQ=4) is a 16550A

serial is set at boot.
Also tried another actiontec (that I know is working)

Since knoppix with kppp shows serial ports are busy, I have to assume that ports on this PC may be damaged or not configurable via BIOS after all. Since am running out of time, I will have to let this PC go with NIC card and eth0 for hispeed use. ( which works fine BTW)

Don't despair....I am keeping VL on the radar. It is the only distro that I can rely on to perform well on older hdwr. You see, I take PCs that are Pll and below and older celerons  with 64-128 mb RAM and donate to kids and schools. They need to be exposed to Linux. Slightly frustrating since the community where I donate is pretty much dialup only. Thanks for all the generous tips. I have found a great resource here but I have to move on regarding this particular PC.

If anyone wants to help on the chestnut dialer..... i also have a celeron 300mhz/128mbRAM and have verified with knoppix live and kppp that ITS serial port and modem (supraexpress) are working fine. However in chestnut, dialer waits so long to dialout that phone offhooks.

chestnut reports
ATZ
OK
AT
OK
nothing.....
exits with connection terminated

Any help with this would be appreciated.

 

[Trio3b]

Well, I can never leave well enough alone. Back to Celeron 577 w 128mb RAM. I installed W98 on this PC and voila!....... serial ports and actiontec (external) are working and am able to connect.

I will not donate this PC however with MS products on it so am reinstalling VL 5.8 gold standard. I wrote down the IRQ and range that this device was using for help in troubleshooting with Chestnut dialer.

OK, I believe that setserial or tty configuration during installation  is incorrect because immediately following this notification which flashes by quickly, hdwr setup indicates no modem found. (this is all during keymord, mouse, LAN setup ).

I used setserial as root:

setserial /dev/ttyS0 then tried to connect via chestnut (where device is set to ttyS0).
I changed device in chestnut to /dev/modem and am now able to hear dialtone thru modem so I assume serial port is now working. However chestnut never dials out. I have inserted all the relevant phone#s, login, password, etc. no luck. ( with most dialers you don't really have to touch any settings other than these three bits of info.....occasionally the device and rarely the init string).

Any ideas?

Thanks

[rbistolfi]

well, thats great, you are very close. I had that trouble before using wvdial, I solved it just using "abort on nodialtone = no" on the wvdial config. I didnt use chestnut too much, so I dont know where you can add an option like this one, but may be others who uses chestnut dialer could help you 

[Trio3b]

Well, finally made it, as I am posting from this PC.  But don't feel confident modifying original post to [SOLVED] until I get closer to the solution.

At this point it appears there are three  MAJOR things that have been configured that have made the difference (the fishy part is... I have done  this all  before):

1. used setserial /dev/ttyS0 command as root in terminal to set modem device

2. Installed wvdial (requires wvstreamers) and QtWvDial. Chestnut just not cutting it.....no help files and it would never dial out

3. wvdial.conf in /etc has to be modified via text editor as root and running wvdial requires root permissions.  Obviously would like user permissions.

Unfortunately I have arrived at this point thru many hours of doing many of the same things over and over but to no avail until now. This does not bode well since  I cannot determine anything specifically I did that tipped the scales as I had tried wvdial and setserial prior to this .  wvdial.conf has been like a ghost....appearing, dissapearing, root permissions....root permissions NOT working, files  not editing even when chmod permissions as root, etc,,,,all very strange.

Anyway, I have 5 PCs I would like to donate this weekend but that will have to wait until I get this figured out as this will be a deal - killer in having users set their own dialup accounts.

This is what ownership and permissions look like in /usr/bin

-rwxrwxrwx 1 user   user       77096 2007-03-08 10:12 wvdial*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 user   user       30708 2007-03-08 10:12 wvdialconf*

wvdial will not run as user or from GUI.... only as root in terminal. This is certainly a permissions problem.


Turns out the port resources being busy is a permissions problem. This may be a wvdial issue, but I'm fairly certain that it what was causing problems with xisp and chestnut as well. I am somewhat peeved that the error messages led me in a completely wrong direction trying to solve IRQ issues.

I do feel that VL is worth pursuing and will try to post a history of my experience when I get it organized more thoroughly.

hope this helps .

[Trio3b]

Sorry about the meandering documentation, but I figure I should do it here for all to see and also better to help me remember what I've done.     

OK, now that I have a connection it's time to check and fix permissions to give users access to wvdial and qtwvdialer which are installed into /usr/bin.

Now to check throughput. Several websites register 8000 kb/s ! Wow that is slow. this rates on a 14k modem level.
OK, throw my knoppix disk in, fire up kppp... wow again. this time it's 38000 kb/s. This rates at least in the neighborhood of a 56k modem....much better. Well, the difference seems to be that kppp populates the dialout command with ATDT while wvdial DOES NOT.

Back to VL5.8 and wvdial> reconfigure modem with dial command as ATDT  -> voila! 38000kb/s.

Well,  closer to my goal! My gut feeling is that kppp (which I have used successfully in the past at speeds up to 47000 kb/s) does more autoconfiguration such as using setserial to make sure the ports are available, assign rights to the user, and populates the modem commands correctly, while xisp, chestnut, and wvdial either require editing of config files or just do not do a proper job of translating information in the frontend (GUI) to the dialer configuration files.

I am puzzled as to why permissions are so strict. Also, none of the error messagaes in any of the three dialers gives a clue as to why the "devices or resources were busy". When new to modems, this can mislead the new user into thinking there are IRQ issues when in reality, I believe this journey was mostly a permissions problem. The error messages could have read  ---> "you do not have sufficient permissions to access this resource". The latter sentence requires five more words but would have saved me five  hours of time.   

Hopefully VL developers could consider the use of  kppp as it has always served me well and appears to  use setserial, populates the modem commands config files more accurately, adjusts permissions more accurately and the GUI seems to have a more user friendly layout. Are there any kppp builds for VL that anyone knows about?

Although I use broadband myself, this puts VL on the map now as a viable solution to donating PCs with very low resources.     

I have written a howto for wvdial on VL 5.8 here-> http://www.vectorlinux.com/forum2/index.php?topic=3671.0

Hope this helps any dial-up users out there.

[bigpaws]

Glad to see you have it working. Permissions can be a real challenge sometimes.

A howto for this since apparently there is no real documentation for Slack or Vector
on the modem.

I see your notes, however there is not enough information for a person to actually use it.

Maybe starting:
Modem xxxx howto

Problem modem will tend not to work due to this (if known)

Fix is:

Change permissions on this file
use this dialer since it is faster.

Bigpaws

[danrael]

I have found chestnut-dialer to work well and pretty easy to set up. Can you elaborate on your problems with it?

I have read the rest of this thread, but I don't want to go to all the trouble of using wvdial.  The chestnut dialer is supposed to work, as you seem to indicate, and I would like to use it.  I have been using a US Robotics 5610 56k PCI hardware modem with great success on many machines and Linux distros, but not with Vector Linux Standard 5.  My machine is an HP Pavilion w/Pentium 3.9/512 RAM with the USR hardware modem described above installed, which is working on the WindowsXP partition of the same drive right now as I write these lines.  I cannot believe that there is such sparse info on this forum re: the chestnut dialer.  Since you have indicated how easy it is to set up, would you mind posting a step by step tutorial on how to get the blasted thing to work for the rest of us stuck in dialup hell?  This is a situation that just should not be an issue of these proportions.  BTW, PCLinux2007 has the same problem.  Their older versions got dialup to work without any trouble, but not 2007. 

[bigpaws]

The README for chestnut looked like good
instructions is there something missing?

Bigpaws

[Joe1962]

Sorry, I don't have dialup or chestnut right now, but it was pretty simple, IIRC. Mostly telling it to use the correct modem device and setting auto ip and DNS. A search might bring up some of the old chestnut threads, though the recent Forum cleanup may have killed them. Worth a try searching on the previous Forum maybe.

[rbistolfi]

Did the VL installer detected the modem during install and made a symlink for you at /dev/modem?

In that case you should just point chestnut to the proper device, as Joe suggested.
If not, you could just try inputing the proper serial port. Find the port where the modem is attached (ttyS0 is com1 in win, ttyS1 is com2 and so on) and try again with chestnut.
Wvdial could do it for you, running wvdialconf as root will scan your serial ports for modems.
Also, AFAIK you have to be root to use this programs, both wvdial and chestnut. To use it as a regular user you have to add yourself to the tty group.

HTH, Rodrigo.