uucico hangup problem

[Scott Barman]

I know this is a problem someone has seen before but I still need to ask
since it bit us during the long holiday weekend.

Let's start with the essentials -
Hardware: Sun 3/60
Operating System: SunOS 3.5  (no flames on not going to 4.0.*.  We have
	a good reason and if you want to hear it email me the request)
Modem: Telebit Trailblazer+ not connected to our PBX and connected to
	/dev/ttya out of the back of the box.
Local filesystem: /usr/spool is symbolicly linked to a directory on a
	disk that is local to the machine but is mounted via NFS on our
	internal network.

Problem: When I finally made it in this morning [:-)] I was doing my
usual checking to find that uucico was still running to the site we feed
news to at 2400 baud and has been executing since last Wednesday night! 
Mail to root, uucp, and daemon only spoke of files in the spool
directory being cleaned out but not of any problems (messages from
/usr/lib/uucp/uucp.night).  There were no auxilary logfile (LOG.*) and
the LOGFILE saved from last Wednesday only showed a REQUEST message
looking to copy a news batch to the remote system.  Doing a ps showed
uucico still running and the modem showed itself as being "off hook." 
No evidence of problems except there was no activity on the modem (e.g.
Tx and Rx LEDs were not blinking) and a uucico running for about 4-5
days.

HELP!  I need to find out how to prevent this from happening again!  If
knowing why it happens helps, fine!  But we are going to be closed the
last week of the year and I'm lible to take off for parts unknown and
would like to leave this machine unattended for that time.  Is there
something I can do?

Please email your response and if there is a significant request for
summaries, I will post one to the net.

All help is appreciated!

-- 
scott barman
{gatech, emory}!nastar!scott