[H-GEN] pppd

[Jason Henry Parker]

On Tue, Sep 15, 1998 at 12:39:25PM +1000, Robin & Andy McPherson-Bruce wrote:
> rc.local now sets /dev/cua1 to spd_vhi & crtscts; eth0 pings the win box
> fine; minicom connects & allows login but the server autostarts ppp &
> dies 'cos it can't get pap authentication access.

Just a quick and little-known fact about Linux:

/dev/cua* are now obsolete, and should not be used.  As far as I can tell,
they are a hang-over from Solaris (?) and provide a way for a program
to grab a serial port when it's already in use by some other program.

(The typical situation is that there's a getty sitting on a modem waiting
for a call in, and you want to be able to start a ppp connection *out*
when you know that no-one will be calling.  Or something like that.)

The problem is that cua* and ttyS* point to the same physical device,
but locking on them gets a bit weird because they don't have the same
inode (cf the perl thread a little while ago on this list).

I'm sorry that I couldn't find an authoritative source for this
information, but I *do* know that you should *not* use cua* under Linux
any more, which is why Byron has been able to report that they don't
exist on his machine any more.

Indeed:

freezer% ls -l /dev/cua*
ls: /dev/cua*: No such file or directory

-- 
---Jason Henry Parker--henry at freezer.humbug.org.au--- ____
|``It is hardly my fault if his wit is so dulled by | \ _/__ 
|long lunches that he cannot recognise irony when it|  \X  /
|pokes him in the belly.''  -- Stuart Littlemore, QC|    \/
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