DTR Doesn't Go Away And They Know

[Mike Mitchell]

I got off the phone with one of Microport's support techs about the DTR
not dropping properly when a getty exits. The short story is that this is
a bug which will get fixed "some day."

In talking to the support tech, he stated that those waiting for the V3.2
release for the '386 will not suffer from the bug once they have upgraded.
However, those of us with '286 machines and V2.4 have two options. Pay
the phone company for another phone line so that it doesn't matter if the
modem answers the line, or wait until the next V/AT release (which does not
seem to be planned).

The support tech assured me that there was someone working on the V/AT
product, however. Trying to get an object module which fixes the bug was
out of the question. The problem appears to be with the way the serial
driver handles the modem control code. Somewhere it is not clearing a
flag that states that the device is closed. After the momentary timeout
which causes the driver to drop DTR, something else decides that there
is a process waiting for an incoming call and the DTR gets reasserted.

It looks like those of us with '286 boxes will have to wait for(ever?) a
long time before we can get solutions to problems that we may have. The
resources at Microport seem to be focused on the '386 world, and they have
problems diverting attention to support the products which they already
have in the field.

It would be nice if the Microport management could assign resources to fix
problems which are reported. If the resources do not exist, then it should
be easy to justify budgeting to address the resource shortage just from the
amount of unhappy people which post to this newsgroup. I would imagine that
there are a few people in the world which would be interested in tackling
the problems which seem to plague this news group (serial ports included).

What is going to happen when Intel releases the 80486? Guess who will get
stuck with a capable machine and no support?
-- 
Mike Mitchell				BELL:	(505) 471-7639
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