[svlug] PPP: Can Dial In and Out Coexist?

[James W. Abendschan]

On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, Timothy King wrote:
> I have PPP working so that I can dial into my machine.  The problem now
> is I have one modem and I cannot dial out when mgetty is running and/or
> I've got stuff needed for dial-in in my /etc/ppp/options file.
> 
> The real hassle is mgetty.  I run it from the /etc/inittab so it will
> respawn after a caller has hung up, which means I'm rebooting to switch
> between dial-in and dial-out modes.

You don't have to reboot.  Comment it out of inittab and do kill -1 1
-- this sends init signal 1, which tells it to reload the inittab.

> 1. Is there some setup where I can both dial-in and dial-out?

It *should* work, actually.  Linux has /dev/cua* and /dev/ttyS* -- one
is for calling out, and one is for dialing in.  I never remember
which is which, myself, and if one fails, I use the other one (how
hi-tech :)  So if you have mgetty listening on /dev/cua*, kermit
out on /dev/ttyS*.  

Also remember that /dev/modem is typically a symlink to the real 
device, so ls -l /dev/modem to find out where it's pointing.

As I understand it, kernel 2.2 is moving away from separate dialin/dialout
devices and using just one single device for both dialin and dialout,
so this sillyness will go away.

> 2. Is there a way to re-read a changed inittab without rebooting?

See above -- kill -1 1.

> 3. If I just want to run mgetty from a shell script, how can I have it
> respawn itself?

well..

#!/bin/sh
while true
do
	/sbin/mingetty blah blah blah
	sleep 5
done

.. but this is kinda silly :)  use inittab instead  :)

James

--
James W. Abendschan
http://www.jammed.com/
I want the TCP/IP equivalent of a Rat Thing.


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