aron roberts <aron@c2.org> writes:
>I may switch to current in a few weeks but right now i am tyring to 
>convince the people i work for to use *nix rather than novell netware for 
>a new dialin server i am building. I heard 1.0 was a bit more stable than 
>current so i decided to screw around with 1.0 on my home machine.

If you're going to be using modems on the machine, I would highly
recommend you get -current.  The serial driver in 1.0 is almost
useless for anything more demanding than a serial mouse, due to
extremely high latency in the interrupt service routine.  It will drop
characters at any speed faster than 9600bps on a 486SX/25 if you don't
have a buffered UART, and can barely keep up with 38.4Kbps on a
486SX/25 if you have a 16550.  I'm not sure if this has been fixed in
-current (I saw some traffic on the current-users mailing list a few
days ago about changes to the com driver, but I haven't gotten a new
source tree since then), but there are patches available that
drastically improve performance.

As far as installing your modem, you may have to turn on the "local"
and/or "softcar" flags on that port.  To do this, edit /etc/ttys and
add the necessary flags to the end of the line, then run "ttyflags -a"
as root.  Just using stty to turn on CLOCAL mode won't work, since the
stty settings are reset when the port is closed.

-Marc