[H-GEN] pppd

[Robert Brockway]

On Tue, 15 Sep 1998, Jason Henry Parker wrote:

> /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

SunOS I think.  Afaik Solaris lacks an equivlanent to /dev/cua?

> to grab a serial port when it's already in use by some other program.

Yeppers.
 
> (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.)

That is the exact reason it was done.  Theodore T'so (hope I spelt that
right :)  said he did it as a bit of a 'hack' and always warned support
for it would go away some day.  That day is here :)

The ttyS? devices do it all as well if not better anyway.

Actually 2.1 kernels allow cua devices to be used but report a warning in
the logs.  I believe 2.2 won't allow then to be used at all. 

> 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.

I must admit to having used them until recently :)
Cheers,
	-Robert

--Robert Brockway B.Sc.  Email: robert at blake.humbug.org.au,
				robert at humbug.org.au, r.brockway at uq.net.au
                         WWW:   http://www.humbug.org.au/~robert
Immediate Past President of HUMBUG (http://www.humbug.org.au)