[ale] Share my frustration: what do you do for fax/data modems?

[Christopher Fowler]

Okay....

I guess I need to explain some things here.  Remember that I deal with
modems daily.  In fact a few today.

1.  If it is too good to be true then it is not true.
2.  Hardware modems cost more than $10
3.  Repeat #2 10 times remembering #1.

Call Ginstar and tell them you need a hardware modem.  They don't keep
many around but they will sell you one.  I pay around $35-$50 ea.  
I've never had problems getting hardware modems to work in Linux.

Multi-Tech sells a USB external powered by USB.  No wall wart.  $125.
Works great in 2.6 not so in 2.4.  Uses acm driver.  Driver has minimal
tty support in 2.4 does not even support character processing.  So stty
says one thing the truth is another.  I had to modify the driver to get
it to support CRNL type features.  I hacked it in an get an occasional
panic.

The USB modem is the size of a standard ZDX.  They have one that is even
smaller about the size of a USB ethernet dongle.  Very nice!

Since I live in a world of serial I respect UARTs. In the good ole days
UARTs were kings.  A true modem needs _no_ driver.  Any modem that
requires one is not a true modem.  Just a DSP masking as one and will
give you problems.  Reliable communications requires reliable hardware
and to me that means a hardware modem is the only answer.


On Fri, 2006-06-16 at 15:50 -0400, Vernard Martin wrote:
> Just like Byron, I am doing modem stuff at the moment.
> 
> The situation: I have a Dell Itanium machine running RedHat Enterprise 
> Linux. It has no USB ports. I have a USB-to-Serial adapater plugged in 
> and its working fine. I'm using an external  USRobotics modem to do SMS 
> messages with the Nagios monitoring system.
> 
> Since the machine is a rackmount, I'd like to eliminate the external 
> modem and its power supply brick and replace it with an internal modem.  
> But the problem of course if finding an internal PCI modem that is 
> supported under linux as well. I don't mind spending money on this as 
> its a enterprise critical system.
> 
> My current attempts at finding a solution was to purchase a $10 modem at 
> Frys that claimed it had linux support. Unfortunately its mostly linux 
> 2.4 kernel support. The 2.6 support doesn't complain cleanly and I'm 
> trying to muddle through that.
> 
> Where can I buy a modem that will definitely work with linux?
> 
> Vernard
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