RH7.3 - mgetty stopped working after up2date - what's wrong?

I wonder if anyone can help?

I've been running a RH7.3 box for about a year, with mgetty 1.1.28 for
out-of-band dial-in.

This worked flawlessly, until I made the mistake of running an up2date
on the box. I let it upgrade mgetty, whereupon it stopped working, so
I downgraded to 1.1.28 again, but it still doesn't work.

It seems to work ok for a short time, and the first call works, but
from then on, communication between the PC and the modem appears to
become very flaky - mgetty sends init strings etc. but sometimes the
OK will appear, sometimes not, sometimes it gets stuck at various
other points in the initialisation process. If it does successfully
initialise, it then can't answer the call, because it doesn't seem to
see the RING message from the modem.

As I write this, it is getting stuck at "lowering DTR to reset
modem...", until I call the number (so RING is sent from the modem),
then it tries to send an init string, but never gets a response.
Weird.

Restarting mgetty doesn't help - it comes back in the "flaky" state.

I have tested the modem on another RH7.3 box with *identical* config
(but before running up2date), and it functions perfectly, so I know
the modem itself is good.

I am sure that the problems are caused by something up2date did, but
can anyone suggest what I might try to fix it?

TIA!

On Fri, 09 Apr 2004 08:34:09 GMT, (E-Mail Removed) (Tim) wrote:

<snip my own tale of woe>

Sorry - just after I posted that message I found the problem - gpm was
holding ttyS0 open! Killed gpm (I have no need for it), and mgetty
started working again :-)

Cheers.