[ILUG] Re: I've lost my modem !

[Niall]

On Sun, 6 Feb 2000, Colin Whittaker wrote:

> Niall stated the following on Sun, Feb 06, 2000 at 01:27:33AM +0000 :
> > I've just installed SuSE 6.3 on a ox which works OK, including using kppp
> > to SurfNoLimits. However, I want to use my own kernel rather than SuSE's
> > default modular one. I'm not exactly a kernel newbie, but this one has me
> > stumped. Having built the kernel, all is good except the modem. Kppp
> > claims it's busy, and minicom gets no response from it - it's as if it
> > wasn't there. The modem's at 0x3E8, IRQ 4 and I've nothing attached to the
> > serial port at 3F8 so the IRQ shouldn't be a problem - in fact it's
> > definitely not as the same box running Mandrake 5.3 with kernel 2.2.10 or
> > SuSE 6.3 with the default kernel or Windoze quite happily uses the modem.
> > So, what can I have buggered up in the kernel config. to have zapped my
> > modem ?
> 
> what ouput does the kernel produce on startup, dmesg should be
> able to output the last batch of boot messages.
> 
> Did you forget to build in serial support into the kernel?

Nothing that simple, unfortunately, but I did solve it. With the
monolithic kernel, kerneld was starting at boot up, with horrible messages
about how I shouldn't run this with kernels > 2.2.0 so I had a look at the
start script and decided that I'd stop the error message by building
kernel support for modules into my mono. kernel, but with everything I
wanted compiled in. With this kernel, for some bizarre reason, the serial
module got loaded even though serial support is compiled in. I copped this
by seeing the line

Serial driver version 4.27 . . .

twice in the dmesg output, and also because the output of setserial showed
UART: unknown instead of UART: 16550A for all three ports in this bizarre
state.

So, I built anew, removing module support. I then modified the kerneld
start script but that didn't stop it getting loaded so I removed the
kerneld binary. I now get some message about memstat when on startup but
I'm ignoring it (when the serial module was being loaded, the only other
module loaded was memstat, whatever it is :-) )