Knob and dial box

[Dolata]

Sometimes the switch on the back of the button box gets turned off.  When it
is turned back on the button and dial boxes don't interact with programs
anymore.

Can someone tell me how to reset them,  short of my current technique of
rebooting the system while the switch is turned on?


Also,  sometimes the port which is attached to my dial out modem gets
hung.   I can "kill -9 nnnn" the processes which are using the port
(typically cu has two hanging on it),  but often when I try to "cu"
after that I am told either that the dev is out of resources, or
unavailable.   Any hints on how to fix that?

Thanks for the help.
Dan