in reply to Device::SerialPort and new RS-232 cards

modprobe will only load the necessary kernel modules to make the chipsets on your serialport card work. To test what port gets assigned to them, maybe check the boot logs, or maybe you could loop thru the possibilities and see what happens? 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Device::Modem;

# fake array :-)  I'm lazy
foreach my $port qw(  /dev/ttyS0  ..  /dev/ttyS24 ){

my $modem = new Device::Modem( log =>'file,modemlog',
      port => $port ) || die "no $port: $!\n";

$modem->reset(); #hangup + attention + restore setting 0 (Z0)
}

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I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth CandyGram for Mongo

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Re^2: Device::SerialPort and new RS-232 cards
by Bruce32903 (Scribe) on May 30, 2008 at 14:55 UTC
    Thank you to the people that have responded so far.

    I'll proceed with the assumption that effort will be required beyond plugging in the cards. My current assumptions are:

    1) The OS will probably see the cards but there is risk of needing to figure out how to use modprobe if the cards are not seen.

    2) I should plan on 5-10 minutes to reinstall Device::SerialPort. I didn't expect this but I had to install Device::SerialPort on a box this morning. As I watched the build messages on the screen it appeared that the install was system configuration dependent.

    3) I am assuming that reinstalling Device::SerialPort will give me a new, clean configuration. If the new install won't cleanly cover up the old install then the old configuration might hang around to cause problems.

    4) It sounds like the port names might be unstable but the "setserial" command in the first response should fix them.

    Thanks,
    Bruce

[reply]
      Also check your bios settings ( the basic computer settings).... many motherboards allow you to assign or disable onboard serial ports, or assign them irq settings, which will affect the ttyS* numbers.

      Additionally you can test the availability of ports without the perl module, 

      open(PORT,"+>/dev/ttyS1") or die "Couldn't open serial port\n";

# etc etc

      [download]
      If you have some spare diskdpace, and can take the time to setup a dual boot, try a full-featured OS like OpenSuSE. I found that it is the best at finding and setting up hardware.

      You might also want to look in your /dev after booting and see what ttyS* links there are. Some distros do it differently, they may be real devices or links to some subdir like tts/*

      Finally if you don't get the chipset recognized, because it is uncommon, or your distro didn't make a module for it, you can do an lspci (assuming it's a pci card) or hwinfo, etc., to get a list of the chipsets. Then you can google for the kernel patch or module to enable that chipset.

      I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth CandyGram for Mongo
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