Re: Serial port functionality testing

[Barry deFreese <bdefreese cox net>]

One problem that I was having with Debian and a digi board with minicom is 
that I forgot to put the getty lines in inittab for the new serial devices.  
Did you add those lines in inittab?

Or is that even necessary ( I am a noob after all!! ).  Though, after I added 
them, minicom started working fine for me.

Bdnewbie

On Thursday 17 October 2002 07:45 am, Kenneth Goodwin wrote:
> Maybe its a typo, but you cant have two serials at the same address 2f8.
> IRQ's dont matter as much - the first two COM1, COM2 are interrupt driven,
> the second two are polled by the OS. If two addresses really are the same ,
> then those two ports i would not expect to work correctly. You may have an
> IRQ conflict on the other two with other devices, check the logs for such
> an IRQ conflict. I am puzzled as to why after you removed the card you are
> still having problems with the on board serial ports. Check ROM BIOS setup
> , and make sure they are still enabled at the standard port address/IRQ's.
> Use restore defaults for that BIOS screen if need be to make sure that
> things are back to normal for the original (pre new board) config. The
> other possibility is that Kudzu does not properly deal with hardware
> removal and the kernel's idea of what serial ports are still on the box is
> corrupted. Anyone else have a suggestion on what he can do besides looking
> at the logs to determine if that is an issue? I would not start swapping
> motherboards, the odds that you fried the serial ports is small and if they
> worked prior to this I would doubt it's a true hardware failure issue. I
> would suspect that the new serial card has addr/IRQ conflicts with the
> motherboard serial ports and that Linux is now confused. You should be able
> to have kudzu?delete all serial ports and then reboot and have it
> rediscover the MB serial ports to put things back to a pre-ISA serial card
> state for starters. Like one can delete the serial ports in the system
> device panle under windows and then reboot
>
>
> The minicom message is just a suggestion to replace all occurances of
> /dev/cua* with /dev/ttyS* To hook up to the latest serial card driver in
> the right way, It just changes major/minor device numbers references for
> the open device calls.
>
> If your other identical MB is on a windoze 9X system, I would try swapping
> hard drives in (linux out wINDOWS IN) and let windoze help you diagnose the
> serial ports by seeing if it sees them and perhaps can configure a modem
> externally connected to them. tHAT WILL AT LEAST HELP YOU DETERMINE IF IT
> IS A HARDWARE or software issue. (die hard linux only  fans - see windoze
> has its uses even if only as a hardware diag tool for linux boxes.)
>
>
> Kenneth Goodwin
> Director of IT Operations
> Datamark Technology, Inc.
>