Hi gargamel, cwizardone and all,

meanwhile I tested several PCI softmodems working with proprietary drivers but none suited hylafax. Lastly I got again a newer (third) external hardware modem, a DIALCOM which is a class 2 modem. I made all the tests again as described above (2 different boxes, checked inittab, serial.conf, rc.serial several times) the modem was again "not responding".

It is not that I am impatient, I spent several weeks with this problem, read every doc and faq I found on the net with no success, also asked the question here..

As there were no more new ideas I just got a desktop with Debian Lenny and installed that damn serial modem in about 4 minutes.

Something is missing in Slackware in the support of serial modems.

The server is still Slackware but will probably migrate to Debian until the end of November.

With all due respect, you are either using win-lite modems, or you are doing something wrong. A true hardware modem will work with Slackware without any special configuration needed.

Yes, they should. Tried also PCI soft-modems, they were OK to dial out but not as fax-server hw. I am not completely sure about the first two serial modems I tried: the first noname modem might be a soft, the second ACORP should not be, this last DIALCOM is a true hardware modem. By the way, success was not achieved on Ubuntu, but Debian which does not supply proprietary drivers by default.

I still believe something is missing and attampted to fix it but did not find an appropriate solution (still, I am not the greatest Slack guru, I admin these siytems since 4 years, so I may be mistaken).

I would truely miss Slackware but jobs are to be done.

As I said before, I have no concrete idea, what your specific problem might be. But generally 9 out of ten problems with *nix systems are problems of inappropriate user privileges. If you can dial out as root, but not as a regular user, it is almost always, because of wrong access rights.

One difference between Debian and other Linux distros are the default access rights for some directories and files. And the groups a user is member of by default. For example, in Slackware, as far as I know, a user must be a member of group dialout in order to be able to access an external modem.

Finally, sometimes a tty device file or a softlink is missing. Where does /dev/modem point to? And if it's not there: What tty device did you use for your attempts, so far? Maybe it's just not the one that is connected with your hardware (and sometimes it's not obvious, which file is being used, and therefore needs to be connected to your application software, although this is where wvdial and KPPP should do some automagic).

As to Hylafax and supported modem classes. Hylafax works fine with Class 2.0 modems, but for most modems Class 1 mode is recommended. Class 2 (which is different to Class 2.0!) is usually not so reliable.

I wish I could provide some more specific information to help you, but as I said, it's been quite a while since I did these things myself, and my knowledge is outdated, and I don't remember all the details.

Good luck, anyway!

gargamel

Hi gargamel,

the last one I tried (DIALCOM) can class 2.0 Asking the capabilities with cu results in a series of numbers, among them 2.0

It appears that the device was on /dev/ttyS0 (tried all possible tty devices during the tests) as by some of the tests the leds of the modems were flashing, I linked that dev to /dev/modem

I edited serial.conf and inittab, reloaded inittab loaded ppp_generic, started rc.serial.

In concern of access rights: in the systems I configure there is no root access at all (I find it insecure in general), I disable it in shadow and give sudo rights to administrators. The tests were made here with sudo, I also thought that rights might be a problem and made some of the tests as root too (enabled root access for a short time).

I have no clue now. I will re-run the tests with the the class 2.0 modem and check everything again during the next weekend. Finding a solution would be much less work than migrating users along with their setups and files.

Thank you for your patience and time.

One idea to track it all down could be to reconnect the modem to the Debian system, where it worked and look, what files are used, and what the filemodes and privileges are there. That might give you a hint, what your probs are caused by on Slackware.

But, to be honest, I wouldn't be overly surprised if the deactivated root access had to do with it. Was the root account deactivated on the Debian machine, too?

Also, as far as I remember, a group uucp was needed in the past, and nowadays the user who wants to initiate a connection needs to be a member of group dialout, and for Hylafax there may be a group fax or so.

Hang on,

gargamel

Another idea: You might try to boot your system with a live distro and see if the modem works with it. If so, you know, at least, that your PC hardware is ok.

Good live distros for this purpose are Knoppix (rather complete) or SLAX (based on Slackware). Both have rather good hardware detection, but there are others, too. It just must be one that supports external modems, of course (which most live distros do).

gargamel