[lug] Serial Comm

Timothy C. Klein teece at silverklein.net
Mon Nov 26 11:22:44 MST 2001


No particular trouble with Minicom, it just seems to work against my
intuition.  I did get it to work, it was not part of the problem at all.
I have also been trying ckermit, which I seem to like so far.

As far as my ttyS0 problem, it is some hardware oddity.  I think I need
to change something in the BIOS of this machine, but I don't feel like
hooking the monitor back up.

This machine is a headless Pentium MMX 200 Mhz that will serve as my
firewall.  I have got the serial console to work, but it required some
strange tricks.  I have to tell LILO to use ttyS0 (serial=0,9600n8), for
it to work.  But I have to give the kernel ttyS1
(append=console=ttyS1,9600n8) for the kernel to work.  Both are working
fine now, but it is odd that each one has to be told to use a different
port.  The serial cable is plugged into the port labelled 'A' now, which
I assume is ttyS0.  It does not work at all (for LILO or the kernel), on
the port labelled 'B'.  The kernel does not find 2 serial ports on this
machine.  I do recall seeing something in the BIOS about IRQs and
serial/modem ports, but like I said, I am lazy and don't feel like
hooking up a monitor again.  I have managed to coerce it into working
now, and I don't need the other serial port anyway.

I had never done this before, so this really had me confused.  When I
set up my second server (much newer machine, will be used as Web, email,
DNS, etc. server), it worked exactly as I would have expected when I
set up the serial console, on the first try.  Go Figure, I should have
done that one first, so that I knew my methodology was correct.

Thanks,

Tim

* carl.wagner at level3.com (carl.wagner at level3.com) wrote:
> What sort of problems with minicom?  I was having lots of 
> problems with it until I turned off hardware flow control.  
> (most of my cables are silver Staten with RJ45 ends 
> connected to modular-to-db connectors.)
> 
> We have some linux boxes with no monitors  hooked to terminal
> servers for console.  Don't know the exact config but if you
> are still having problems I could get it.
> 
> On your ttyS0 thing, I would not trust the labels. It may have
> been a "Hangover Monday" when they put them on.  Or possibly 
> you have an internal modem?  If so, can you boot dos and use
> something like procomm to find out what ports you have?  I would
> make sure what is on what serial port since com1 and com3 share
> an interrupt as well as com2 and com4 (ttyS0 and ttyS2,  ttyS1 
> and ttyS3 under Linux) and unintentional interrupt sharing of 
> serial ports has caused me a lot of problems.
> 
> Carl.
> 
> "Timothy C. Klein" wrote:
> > 
> > Hello,
> > 
> > Anyone out there use a good serial communication program?  I have
> > minicon, and I just hate it.  For whatever reason, we just don't get
> > along.  In Debian, I can't find much else beyond Seyon, and I don't
> > always have X.  Is there anything else that anybody uses?  I am trying
> > to set up a serial console from my firewall to my main machine, both
> > running Debian, but to no avail.  In the past, half of my problems
> > usually involve minicom.
> > 
> > TIA,
> > Tim
> > --
> > ==============================================
> > == Timothy Klein || teece at silverklein.net   ==
> > == ---------------------------------------- ==
> > == "Hello, World" 17 Errors, 31 Warnings... ==
> > ==============================================
> _______________________________________________
> Web Page:  http://lug.boulder.co.us
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--
==============================================
== Timothy Klein || teece at silverklein.net   ==
== ---------------------------------------- ==
== "Hello, World" 17 Errors, 31 Warnings... ==
==============================================



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