Alternatives that don?t suck?

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008, Collins Richey wrote:
>On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 1:29 PM, Lonni J Friedman <netllama at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> doesn't this change effectively allow multiple users to simultaneously
>> control the modem?  If so, that seems rather bad.
>>
>
>One of the real drawbacks of Unix and plus points of a mainframe OS
>like MVS or VM is the fact that non-sharable devices like tapes,
>modems, communications connectors, etc. cannot be shared. There is a
>standard function to reserve a device (called device allocation) for
>exclusive use, and you don't need to be the equivalent of a root user
>to allocate a device. Disks, of course, are treated differently.

This is fine -- if you can figure out the JCL to make things work (I grew
up on Burroughs MCP where things were done right without JCL :-).

This isn't really a problem with Linux even with dial-in and dial-out on
the same device when running a proper getty that knows to leave the
ownership of /dev/ttyS? as uucp:uucp when idle, and the dialing programs
are setuid uucp.  I have had to hack the /bin/getty source on some old
versions of Caldera to get it to leave the device ownership correct after
dial-in sessions.

I normally use the faxgetty from HylaFAX as I have never been able to get
fax+getty to work properly.

Bill
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