Hello all

I have been working in Slackware 8.1 off and on trying to learn my way arround.

My initial install went without problems and I chose not to configure my network card during install so I was running as steve or root@darkstar and only lo was listed under ifconfig command. I successfully set up my modem both with kppp and pppsetup. ppp-go worked as root and kppp worked as root and as a user.

I have an isa modem that is (or was) recognized as /dev/ttyS0.

I decided to cofigure my isa NIC (smc etherEZ) and changed my hostname and my domain name. Static IP of 192.168.1.1, no dns, no gateway. Then rebooted.

Now I cannot access the modem. kppp tells me the modem is busy. ppp-go tells me the script failed.

dmesg gives the following information:

Serial driver version 5.05c (2001-07-08) with HUB-6 MANY_PORTS MULTIPORT SHARE_IRQ SERIAL_PCI enabled
ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
ttyS01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
<snip>
isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards...
isapnp: Card 'SMC EtherEZ (8416)'
isapnp: Card '56K Internal Modem with Speaker phone'
isapnp: 2 Plug & Play cards detected total
smc-ultra.c: Presently autoprobing (not recommended) for a single card.
smc-ultra.c: ISAPnP reports SMC EtherEZ (8416) at i/o 0x240, irq 11.
smc-ultra.c:v2.02 2/3/98 Donald Becker (becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov)
eth0: SMC EtherEZ at 0x240, 00 00 C0 10 B7 D9,assigned IRQ 11 programmed-I/O mode

When I try to access the modem I get these messages from dmesg:

CSLIP: code copyright 1989 Regents of the University of California
PPP generic driver version 2.4.1
ttyS0: LSR safety check engaged!
ttyS0: LSR safety check engaged!
ttyS0: LSR safety check engaged!

This happened before but I didn't know that changing the network setting was to blame. I had previously tried changing the serial port parameters with setserial to no avail. I ended up re-installing slack and avoiding the network set-up for this reason. My research led me to understand that LSR safety check was enabled when there was a memory address conflict. But there doesn't seem to be a conflict of IRQ or IO-ports.

I have two other distros running on the same machine with the same settings and there is no problem.

I've read that autoprobing the isa cards can cause problems - could this be the issue? Autoprobing is enable in the other distros with no problem.

Also /dev/ttyS00 and /dev/ttyS01 are not typos - what's up with that?

Thanks in advance

Ok, first of all...

Are you dialing into the internet through the phone lines?? A NIC is for cable/dsl/lan, also, dial doesnt have a static IP, you get issued a IP when you connect. Now you see why??

Perhaps I wasn't clear.

I have a modem and a nic. Yes I us dial up. Yes I don't know either why doing one would effect the other, but for some reason after setting up the network card, the modem beame unaccessable and the only change I made was my network configuration. I had been using the modem successfully for 2 weeks prior.

Now , immediatlly after making this change my modem is not accessable and i felt there must be some hardware conflict after the network card setup. This is why is posted the LSR safety check engaged message because this is printed (from what I read) when linux has a problem assigning memeory address to the com port and the message was not there before this problem started.

As I said above, my set up is no different from the other two distros on the same machine so i thought this might be something i was forgetting to do because I'm new to slack.

thanks

You might want to look into the isapnp configuration. Since that is what is configuring the two devices. You may need to do a manual config for the isapnp. I haven't used isapnp since, oh back in the 2.2 kernel days before there was isapnp kernel support. There are some config files in /etc as isapnp.conf and isapnp.gone. But I do not know how they would work for a kernel level setup at boot when the file system is not loaded. Unless it does the configuring when the device is activated, like in your case when the NIC is configured. Perhaps you will find your solution in these files.

Wow, I popped back to post a quick update and saw that my response to Excalibur never came up. Sorry 'bout that.

Excalibur - thanks for your reply.

I've started looking into those files and reading the mans on isapnp, pnpdump, and isapnptools. The config files you listed don't seem to be being used right now because they are named as examples. I ran pnpdump and it seems to provide a skeleton for isapnp.conf.

I disabled the initialization of the NIC by commenting out relative lines in /etc/rc.S that point to the network.rc file responsible loading the SMC ultra module and - lo and behold - modem worked again. So I'm definitely dealing with some kind of hardware conflict. The conflict doesn't turn up on boot, but when pppd attempts to access /dev/ttyS0 to dial out. (when eth0 is loaded of course)

Ignore previous notes re: ttyS0 vs ttyS00. seems to be just a placeholder 0.

Still trying to decide if this is a case of slack needing extra configuring that is done for you in other distros or me making a simple error more difficult than it needs to be.

I will have limited time to work on this over the holiday w/e. I'll post back as people respond and or i figure something out.

thanks

steve

I did some searching for your error message but I was not able to locate anything of any real value to help here. The message and problem appears to be originating from the serial.c driver. According to the source code the register, LSR, is failing to be initialized. The driver then assumes that it is not a serial port UART that it is working with and terminates.

Since we know that it is a modem and the modem functions correctly until the network card is enabled. I have to conclude that the isapnp is changing the configuration. For the isapnp config appears to be readable/writable in /proc/isapnp. You might want to investigate this file(directory). With the network disabled and the modem functioning then review the /proc/isapnp. Activate the network card, and review the /proc/isapnp again. See if any differences on the modem are noticed. Or if the modem and network card overlap in some area that would prevent the modem from responding correctly after the NIC is activated. Please feel free to post the info if you can see something worth reading.

I have seen some general type problems arise when a PnP OS is used and the motherboard is also set to init PnP devices from the BIOS. The two may not agree on each other. The solution is usually to disable one if possible. Suggest reviewing BIOS settings here and see if PnP config can be disabled/enabled.

Sorry I could not be of more help.

Actually you have been a help by confirming my thought process.

I did run cat /proc/isapnp and plan on checking this against the same in SuSE (in which this configuration works fine using isapnp).

This is a tricky issue. there is not alot regarding the LSR safety check out there except other people asking the same question. I did find a post that i saved and will post if i find it helps solve the problem in any way.

I'll post as I find things. I dont think i need to change any bios settings as redhat and suse work fine. I would like to figure this out as it seems it may help some others with modem connection issues. Plus I might learn something in the process.

What I don't understand is why the 2.4.x kernel is giving me problems with this. Oh well.

later

I'm not sure whether you really need to use the isapnp tools anymore (i could be mistaken). My isa network card is detected by the kernel without the need to mess around with the isapnp.conf file (something I found too painful in the old days of 2.2 kernel as well). I think that it might be because the 2.4 series has better support for PnP hardware.

Anyway, you should be able to alter hardware settings without needing to use the isapnp tools, you can instead pass them as options to the modules when they are loaded. You may want to take a look at /usr/src/linux/Documentation/network/ for your particular cards readme file and look for the options that you can set there.

There's also a useful file on the slack cd which talks about setting parameters at run time in lilo for this sort of thing. If it is a hardware confllict, you may need to force the cards to use certain irqs etc.

Not sure if thats relevant but nevermind.

Anyway, what is the modem you have? any messages relevant about that?

btw, what bits of the rc.S file did you uncomment? maybe if we could tell which command isn't being run which allows the modem to work, we could see where the problem may be coming from.

Just a suggestion

Alex

Problem Solved!!!!

The short version for those not intersted in details is that the slackware default kernel has pnp support and isapnp compiled as modules instead of directly into the kernel. Booting Slack with the RedHat 2.4.18-4 kernel (with pnp and isapnp compiled directly into the kernel) allowed things to work properly.

Review of problem - ISA Modem, which worked prior to configuration of the network and activation of the network card, suddenly stopped working once the network card (also ISA) was loaded at boot. The network card never failed to load correctly. Error messages on attempting to use the modem after the NIC was enabled were as follows:

kppp - "sorry, modem is busy"
ppp-go - "connect script failed"
dmesg - "/dev/ttyS0 (modem port) "warning LSR safety check engaged"

webtoe - you were right. As I also suspected after reading the isapnp mans and such - I really shouldn't have to mess with those isapnp config files with this newer kernel.

Several things clued me in as to what was going on.

Running cat /proc/isapnp in Slack with the NIC enabled showed listings for both the isa NIC and the isa modem - but the modem was listed as NOT ACTIVE.

Disabling the NIC, rebooting, then running cat /proc/isapnp gave me a "file does not exist message". In otherwords isapnp was not being called on boot unless the NIC was initialized. This was very different from what happened in the other Distros where disabling the NIC on boot still resulted in a /proc/isapnp file being created, but the NIC was listed as NOT ACTIVE.

Doing an lsmod in all distros showed that a isa-pnp module was being loaded in slack at boot by the smc-ultra module - some thing that wasn't happening in suse and redhat.

Checking the kernel configs showed the difference in pnp support and isapnp being modularized in slack, but compiled directly into the kernel in the other two distros. (actually, SuSE has only pnp support compiled directly in the kernel with isapnp compiled as a module, so it may be that you only need to have pnp support compiled directly - i'll test this later and let you know)

Rather than reconfiguring the kernel, I just added a new section to my grub.conf file using the RedHat kernel, pointed to the Slack root directory, copied the redhat module file to /lib/modules in Slack, rebooted, and everything worked.

I don't know enough to describe the why's and what for's regarding this problem. Hopefully this might give others a place to look if they can't get their isa modem to work properly.

Happy Easter to those who celebrate and thank you to those who posted to my thread.

Steve