Hi
I would be grateful for any advice in getting Red Hat 9 to recognize a Sitecom DC-003 external serial modem. According to Sitecom, the modem "is fully Plug 'n Play compatible in a Linux environment". Consequently, they don't provide drivers on their website. The modem works OK, because I have tried it on my Windows partition.

I think the problem may be that as my laptop does not have a serial port, I am using a Linux compatible adapter. Red Hat has recognised the adapter fine (see ref to FTDI in dmesg detail below), but I wondered if the fact that (as far as I can understand, and I am very new to this) the modem is now connected to port ttyUSB0 instead of ttyS0 (which doesn't exist, of course) is at the bottom of this. I have tried '#setup' but none of the options take you to modem configuration.

One other point - there is an apparently Windows-only internal modem in the laptop (Xircom MPCI). Could this be the problem?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.


What I assume to be the relevant section of dmesg printout is:

hub.c: new USB device 00:05.2-1, assigned address 2
usb.c: USB device 2 (vend/prod 0x403/0x6001) is not claimed by any active driver.
EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.19, 19 August 2002 on ide0(3,3), internal journal
Adding Swap: 257000k swap-space (priority -1)
usb.c: registered new driver serial
usbserial.c: USB Serial support registered for Generic
usbserial.c: USB Serial Driver core v1.4
usbserial.c: USB Serial support registered for FTDI SIO
usbserial.c: USB Serial support registered for FTDI 8U232AM
usbserial.c: FTDI 8U232AM converter detected
usbserial.c: FTDI 8U232AM converter now attached to ttyUSB0 (or usb/tts/0 for devfs)
ftdi_sio.c: v1.2.1:USB FTDI Serial Converters Driver

Who makes the USB to Serial converter?

I bought it from PTronix ( I live in UK). No name on box or adapter. According to PTronix website, it uses FTDI chip, with driver built into linux kernel. Certainly Red Hat had no problem picking it up.

That is true, I have used a USB to serial adapter made by KeySpan. It to has a driver that is built into the Kernel (had to compile it into the Red Had 9.0 2.4.20-6 kernel though). And when it pick up the serial ports it assigned them to ttyS0 so that looked just like a standard serial port to Linux. Then in my case i was able to dial the modem using the AT commands across the ttyS0 port. So i don't know why the FTDI doesn't do that.

Is there some way I can rename the ttyUSB0 port, so that it appears to be ttyS0? Maybe the modem driver would recognise it then. Must stress that I am only guessing here, as very new to Linux.

Can you send AT commands to the modem even though it is on ttyUSB0?

Tye
ATD (and then a phone number)

Try calling yourself and see if the modem can call out. If this is true then modem is usable.

OK, thanks everybody for suggestions. All sorted now and in fact sending this reply on my new connection. As it turns out, the problem arose from my ignorance of Red Hat. I didn't realise that the modem was not activated automatically when you open your web browser or e-mail, but that you have to activate it yourself in the Network Configuration. Another lesson learned.