UUCP polling

[James C. Benz]

I'm having a little problem with UUCP polling of remote systems using UNIX
3.51 on a 3B1/7300 PC.  Let me go over how I have set this up, and maybe
someone out there who has done this before can set me straight.  I have
set up the L.sys file so that it says something like this :

DEVEL Any1000-1500 ACU 1200 chat script stuff

and crontabs like this:

0,30 9,10,11,12,13,14,15 * * * phset DATA
0,30 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23 * * * phset VOICE
35 10 * * * echo "DUMMY" >/tmp/dummy;uucp /tmp/dummy DEVEL!/usr/spool/uucppublic

I am using the OBM and the phone line is connected to LINE 1.  Phset of course
does what phtoggle does, except specifying VOICE or DATA.

Now, one of the problems I have is this.  At 9:30 AM, the machine wants to
set the line to DATA.  Normally, this works fine, except in the case where
someone calls my house at, say, 9:15, gets no answer, and hangs up.  The
phone manager fails to reset the LINE<RING icon at the top of the screen to
LINE IDLE.  When phset fires off at 9:30, an error window pops up saying 
line 1 is in use.  The line stays frozen in LINE<RING for the rest of the
day, and the error windows pile up until the machine runs out of process 
table and refuses to fork any more processes.  When I get home from work,
I have to back out of all those error windows manually, which kind of defeats
the purpose of having automatic polling in the first place.  

Another related problem has to do with line setting while the phone really is
busy.  Phset fails to get the line and pops up another error window.  This is
not so severe a problem, since once the person using the phone hangs up, 
within 1/2 hour, the line gets set to DATA and uucico takes over.  I still
get an error window, but only one.

So, what I would like to do is write a shell script that will delay calling
phset until the line is *really* not busy, and in the process clean up the
LINE<RING error somehow.  Unfortunately, I have been unable to determine
how to test the line to determine its status *before* calling phset.  
/usr/spool/uucp/LCK* doesn't help, since a LCK is placed whenever the line
is set to VOICE anyway.  Has anyone done this?  I'm sure *someone* has set
one of these machines up to do auto-polling.  Any help or advice would be
appreciated.


-- 
Jim Benz 		     jcbst3 at unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu     If a modem 
University of Pittsburgh					 answers,
UCIR			     (412) 648-5930			 hang up!