Solution to Problems with UUCP/modems.

[Duncan McEwan]

In <37899 at pyramid.pyramid.com> csg at pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) writes:
>acucntrl is a little hack that comes with 4.3BSD. It is invoked by uucico when
>it wants to make an outgoing call, to scribble on the tty data structures in

An earlier version of OSx (3.?) supported uucico automatically invoking
acucntrl to do it's stuff if the keyword "inout" appeared in L-devices.  That
capability seems to have disappeared from OSx 4.?, so I have to invoke
uucico from a script with a call to acucntrl immediately before it.  This is
a right pain, since it complicates the way I have to do polling.  Why was
it taken out?

>Standard OSx does not provide acucntrl. The 4.3BSD version is highly VAX de-
>pendent (what do you expect for a program that opens and writes on /dev/kmem?)
>and needs a fair amount of hacking to make it work on a Pyramid.  Several brave
>souls have done this, including Romain Kang @ pyrnj

In fact, I think it is rather easier to make it work on a Pyramid than on
a VAX running 4.3.  The version I run, which came indirectly from Romain, but
which I modified slightly (can't remember why now -- its been a while)
has all the /dev/kmem stuff ripped out and replaced by an ioctl to the
itp driver to set hardwired carrier on.

I don't think the result behaves exactly like the 4.3bsd version, in that
after enabling software carrier any transition of the hardware carrier will
not be noticed.

Apart from that it seems to work reasonably well most of the time.
Occasionally if fails mysteriously - the acucntrl seems to succeed (ie
it doesn't write a diagnosic indicating the ioctl failed) but the following
invokation of uucico gets a "TIMEOUT ON DEVICE OPEN" error.  Not having
access to the source to the itp driver, I don't know if there any
circumstances in which the ioctl returns with a good status but didn't,
or perhaps hasn't yet enabled the software carrier.  Since it works
most of the time, I have never gotten around to investigating the problem.

>Someday (*SIGH*) someone here will implement the Sun/Mt. Xinu fix that allows
>real modem devices and provides portable goof-proof in/out calling.

That would indeed be a nice addition.

>If, say, Southwest Bell (Hi Bruce!) were to threaten to dump all their
>machines in the Mississippi if they didn't have dialin/dialout capability,
>then it would get done tomorrow afternoon. :-)

C'mon Bruce -- how about it, huh?  What's a few wet Pyramid's between
fellow users :-)

Duncan