what name does com1 rs232 get in F16+ ?

[Joel Rees]

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 9:05 PM, Fernando Cassia <fcassia at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 8:59 AM, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>>
>> There probably was some option for me to set in the network
>> configuration whether any user could bring the interface up and down,
>> rather than requiring root to do it.  I don't really know, but it sounds
>> familiar, and makes sense.

http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/4/

If you have some old hardware you're not using, you can take a look.
FC4 didn't really require much RAM, CPU, or disk. Although the widget
in question may not be part of what's still in the archives.

> Of course it made sense. The current situation doesn't. :)

Depending on what the widget did, maybe it did and maybe it didn't.
What happens is SUSE is what happens in SUSE. A lot of what happened
in Linspire shouldn't have happened.

If the widget allowed an admin user to give modem access to a regular
user, that might have been a useful feature in a GUI widget.

If the widget set the modem port to be world accessible, well, that is
a definite mis-feature in the current world. Such things may have
seemed to make sense to some people (you mentioned Linspire?) in the
old days, but we know better now.

> Unless we're talking about a server configuration where you might want
> things pretty much locked tight as default. :) ...

Every modern computer system runs servers. That kind of distinction is
not good when talking about system security, especially in these days
when so many feature-full tools are availale to the skr!pt kiddies.

> Thanks Tim for proving my memory isn't that bad... I'd have remembered if I
> had to fiddle with permissions to get access to the serial port.
>
> Anyway... moving on.... I'm trying to find what else I need to do to have
> *any* program talk to my dial-up modem.

Do you mean, any program that takes a mind to it (world read/write),
or any program at all (group access, adding specific users to the
relevant group)?

> My plan is to set up a dial-in
> server, but first I need to know if the POTS RJ11 port of my FTTH ONT
> supports data calls, as I suspect it does, and to do that I need to try
> dialing some dial-up ISP....
>
> So far the modem is laughing at me. "see?, Linux guys and their
> permissions!" it said.
>
> ;)
> FC

The world is not as simple as some people thought back then.

Anyway, did you try figuring out what group owns the modem port and
adding your user to that group?

--
Joel Rees