On Sat, 21 Oct 1995, Ben Cottrell wrote:
> If I do an "echo ath1 > /dev/ttya" or an "stty all < /dev/ttya" (to
> check the tty settings), it just hangs and I have to kill the
> process.
I had exactly the same problem when using my Sun 3/60 with SunOS 4.1.1 
with my 14k4 modem. It turned out to be the Carrier Detect which was
the problem: if you don't connect it at all everything works allright,
but when it's connected to your modem, you'll only be able to write to
the serial port when the Carrier Detect is high, which is really 
troublesome with modems because most applications expect Carrier Detect 
to be high only when a connection has been established.

The 'solution' for me was to use a PC (any dumb terminal would do ;-) to 
set the modem settings in the NVRAM, so it would always have carrier high.

If anybody knows a real solution (compared to this workaround) I'd
like to hear from you. BTW: how does NetBSD for Sun3 compare to SunOS for 
stability and speed? Is the binairy compatibility with SunOS good? I'm 
hesitating to replace SunOS with NetBSD because my Sun 3/60 is used 
heavily by 4 users because I don't want too much downtime.

Greetings,
  Geert

E-Mail: geert@sun3.iaf.nl 
 Phone: +31-53-4303054