Hello Paul and Group.
After sticking the ax25 stuff on my linux box the other day I had the
same problem that Paul had with a port that stopped working all of a
sudden. At the time I had one port ax0 on /dev/ttyS1 and at times it
would die within seconds of starting up and sometimes it would go for
hours. It seemed to depend on the traffic heard on that port.
A couple of things I noticed was that each time it died there would be
a lot of traffic on the freq (forward traffic from my BBS) and at
the same time there would be an RX error (errors:1) in "ifconfig ax0". I
think it could have something to do with the serial port card I was
using (maybe reporting the wrong type of UART) that showed itself when
the port was put under heavy load. Today I tossed that card (actually I
took to it with a soldering iron and stuck it in my windows box as I/O
4e8 and 5e8) and put a good card in the linux box as ttyS2 and ttyS3.
Never did like that other card. That's why it was available to put in
the linux box in the first place. There could be a bit more to the
story, but I've typed enough for now. The answer could be new hardware
or use setserial to change the UART type. I'm just guessing really, but
it seems logical from my newbie point of view.
Here are the two ports now. ax0 on ttyS2 and ax1 on ttyS3
ax0 Link encap:AMPR AX.25 HWaddr VK3BVP-3
inet addr:44.136.120.9 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP RUNNING MTU:256 Metric:1
RX packets:2480 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:539 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
ax1 Link encap:AMPR AX.25 HWaddr VK3BVP-8
inet addr:44.136.121.9 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP RUNNING MTU:256 Metric:1
RX packets:6045 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:4381 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
I added a 7th port to BPQ on the BBS computer, put linfbb on this
computer and linked them through a nul modem cable. The traffic going
through ax1 is winfbb forwarding to linfbb. 403 bulls to go :-)
I know I have to fix up the IP masks on the ports, but it's been a long day.
Tomorrow maybe.
Shane VK3BVP..
ps: Boy, have I done some reading the last couple of days. One day I
might undertand some of it :-)
