Greetings Monks,

I would like to expand some test equipment at work and it would require more serial ports than I currently have in the boxes. This puts me in a catch-22. I need to be able to say how long it will take and what tasks will be needed before I can get the green light from management, but I won't know the answers until I have done it.

The boxes are Intel Architecture running Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10. The hardware is probably 3-5 years old. The versions of Perl and Device::SerialPort were all installed "fresh" over the last year or so. If I go down to my local clone shop and get some $20 cards:

1) Will the OS see them and automatically give me new ttyS1, ttyS2, etc. ports? (that Perl can use)

2) Will Device::SerialPort be happy to work or did it become system configuration dependent when I compiled it at install time?

3) Will the name of the serial ports (ttySn) remain stable or will they change every time I reboot? I learned the hard way that ethernet cards will "float" when installed later. It took a long time to trip accross the procedure of setting the MAC addresses in a special file. Is there a similar issue with adding serial ports to a system after the OS install?

4) Anything else I need to know?

5) I assume that someone will respond with "modprobe". I have Googled modprobe in the past and never really gotten a good feel for it. What is "modprobe"?

Thanks,
Bruce

In reply to Device::SerialPort and new RS-232 cards by Bruce32903

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