Serial port Troubleshooting

From Rivendell Wiki

Disclaimer: In Linux, there are many ways to do anything. That doesn't necessarily mean any one way is right, wrong, better, worse, whatever. Any examples or commands listed are for a recent SUSE distribution. If you choose to use something else, the information may have to be modified.

Before anything else, verify you have serial ports and that they are working. I check the startup files.

dmesg | grep tty

serial8250: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A serial8250: ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A

This tells me I have two ports, ttyS0 and ttyS1. These would be equal to COM1 and COM2 for those who are used to COM ports.

You can also use the setserial command.

setserial -g /dev/ttyS*

/dev/ttyS0, UART: 16550A, Port: 0x03f8, IRQ: 4 /dev/ttyS1, UART: unknown, Port: 0x02f8, IRQ: 3 /dev/ttyS2, UART: unknown, Port: 0x03e8, IRQ: 4 /dev/ttyS3, UART: unknown, Port: 0x02e8, IRQ: 3 /dev/ttyS4, UART: unknown, Port: 0x0000, IRQ: 0 /dev/ttyS5, UART: unknown, Port: 0x0000, IRQ: 0 /dev/ttyS6, UART: unknown, Port: 0x0000, IRQ: 0 /dev/ttyS7, UART: unknown, Port: 0x0000, IRQ: 0

In this case, only one serial port shows up.

interceptty

Interceptty can be a useful tool to see what is going on with a serial port in Rivendell.

You can get it at its website. Installation and usage instruction are there as well.

Here is a simple example of how to use interceptty to monitor what Rivendell is doing.

Note: I am using /dev/ttyS0 the first serial port in these examples if you are using a different port change it to that.

1) Open a konsole window 2) su root and enter the root password 3) type the following command

interceptty -s 'ispeed 19200 ospeed 19200' /dev/ttyS0 /dev/rivendell

Note: The above assumes a baud rate of 19200, change it to match your serial port's speed.

Now to send the output of Rivendell via interceptty go into RDAdmin>Mananage Hosts>Select your host>Edit>Serial Ports

Change the "tty device" to /dev/rivendell and click "Close"

Note: you must do this last step after interceptty is running as it creates the device /dev/rivendell otherwise Rivendell can not connect to it as it does not exist.

Now try running a test event in RDCatch and watch the output in the konsole window.