How did I get mgetty running?:

I'm not an expert, so I might have done some things poorly, but the results
work.

As far as I can tell, mgetty was written first for Linux, so there are a
few changes that have to be made to get it to work on a BSD type machine.
Somebody has done those changes for FreeBSD and even put it together in a
FreeBSD port. What FreeBSD calls ports, we here in the NetBSD camp call
packages (since we already use the term port to refer to NetBSD on other
computer platforms). Since I needed the packages system to work with
FreeBSD ports, my first step was to get pkgsrc from ftp.netbsd.org (or one
of the mirrors). I got the pkgsrc-current tree.

mgetty requires perl to install, so I did a "make install" of perl, which
demonstrated that the package system was working fine on my computer. Then
I went to ftp.freebsd.org and got their port files for mgetty, which can be
found in the comms directory. Once that was accomplished, I ran "make
install" which goes through most of the steps correctly, but errors out
during the install of the documentation.

Being lazy, I didn't try to find the error in the install process, I just
went to the working directory where the package system had placed the
source files and ran "make install" using mgetty's Makefile. I thought that
it was worth a try, and it worked. :)

Configuring mgetty is easy, but I recommend reading the manual which can be
found at <http://wais.leo.org/~doering/mgetty/>.

I wanted to use mgetty because I wanted to have both PPP and regular
terminal dial ins to a IIcx on my office network. We now use the IIcx with
two modems as a dial in server for five people.


Eric Damien Berna
Thiel Visual Design
Phone: 414.271.0775
Email: eric@thiel.com