Dial-in, Dial-out. Same line, easy?

William L. Sebok wls at astrovax.UUCP
Sat Dec 8 10:36:24 AEST 1984


I have just posted the changes to the 4.2 BSD uucp and tip to use the same
line for both dialing in and dialing out.  Similar changes existed here when
we were running 4.1 BSD.  The heart of it is a program called acucntrl that does
a lot of poking and hacking  (which it must because no straightforward hooks
are provided into the operating system to do what must be done), and thus
is specific to 4.2 BSD with the Vax dz, dh, or dmf drivers.  Thus I can't
guarantee it for other than the VAX although who knows.  The modifications to
it if any for 4.X BSD on some other computer should be at least straight
forward.  The modifications to it for System V are harder but should be doable
(though System V provides other hooks than those used here). 

This may start some flaming but I should at least say what I think one of those
hooks should be.  For a start, I think that the use of modem control should be
settable by an ioctl.  Terminal lines with modem control enabled should hang
on first read rather than hanging on open, to allow one to gain the access to
do this ioctl.  To enable/disable modem control I must poke in /dev/kmen to
toggle one of the driver bits, which accounts for the driver dependence.

Some better communication with init (process one) would also be nice.  For
instance in 4.2 BSD it could be listening to a socket.  There are some terrible
kluges resulting from the fact that one has little way of determining when
init has responded to a request.
-- 
Bill Sebok			Princeton University, Astrophysics
{allegra,akgua,burl,cbosgd,decvax,ihnp4,noao,princeton,vax135}!astrovax!wls



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