jcbst3@cisunx.UUCP (James C. Benz) (03/14/89)
I'm having a little problem with UUCP polling of remote systems using UNIX 3.51 on a 3B1/7300 PC. Let me go over how I have set this up, and maybe someone out there who has done this before can set me straight. I have set up the L.sys file so that it says something like this : DEVEL Any1000-1500 ACU 1200 chat script stuff and crontabs like this: 0,30 9,10,11,12,13,14,15 * * * phset DATA 0,30 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23 * * * phset VOICE 35 10 * * * echo "DUMMY" >/tmp/dummy;uucp /tmp/dummy DEVEL!/usr/spool/uucppublic I am using the OBM and the phone line is connected to LINE 1. Phset of course does what phtoggle does, except specifying VOICE or DATA. Now, one of the problems I have is this. At 9:30 AM, the machine wants to set the line to DATA. Normally, this works fine, except in the case where someone calls my house at, say, 9:15, gets no answer, and hangs up. The phone manager fails to reset the LINE<RING icon at the top of the screen to LINE IDLE. When phset fires off at 9:30, an error window pops up saying line 1 is in use. The line stays frozen in LINE<RING for the rest of the day, and the error windows pile up until the machine runs out of process table and refuses to fork any more processes. When I get home from work, I have to back out of all those error windows manually, which kind of defeats the purpose of having automatic polling in the first place. Another related problem has to do with line setting while the phone really is busy. Phset fails to get the line and pops up another error window. This is not so severe a problem, since once the person using the phone hangs up, within 1/2 hour, the line gets set to DATA and uucico takes over. I still get an error window, but only one. So, what I would like to do is write a shell script that will delay calling phset until the line is *really* not busy, and in the process clean up the LINE<RING error somehow. Unfortunately, I have been unable to determine how to test the line to determine its status *before* calling phset. /usr/spool/uucp/LCK* doesn't help, since a LCK is placed whenever the line is set to VOICE anyway. Has anyone done this? I'm sure *someone* has set one of these machines up to do auto-polling. Any help or advice would be appreciated. -- Jim Benz jcbst3@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu If a modem University of Pittsburgh answers, UCIR (412) 648-5930 hang up!