Problems with pseudo device allocation and in.pmd

Kim Hendrikse (kim@nexial.nl)
Thu, 10 Jul 1997 21:04:20 +0200 (MET DST)

I having problems getting more than 9 pseudo devices to connect through to
portmaster ports. The portmaster is contacting the inetd on the host every
minute and if I specify less than 9 devices, everything works ok. There is a
slight problem still with the way the in.pmd daemon allocates the ports, it
symbolically links all the ports in sequence to /dev/pts/0, /dev/pts/1 etc,
and skips /dev/pts/8 for some reason but it will not do this for more than 9
ports. i.e. /dev/ttyr0-/dev/ttyr8 for example. If more than 9 ports are
specified, everything will work except that only the first 9 ports will be
allocated. The exception to this is if one of the ports collides with an
existing in-use pseudo terminal, such as one used by an x-term. This is
actually in conflict with the sparse documentation about the subject which
says that one should choose high numbered pseudo terminal devices in order
to avoid collisions as most applications go for low number ones first. The
problem with this advice is that the in.pmd daemon rewrites the symbolic
links to point to the lowest numbers terminal nodes anyway!! rather than
using the assignments configured by the OS, and thus still collides. If a
collisions occurs the in.pmd daemon dies (Silently, I cannot see any way to
get it to give out any kind of information at all, there's no command line
parameters, no manual entry for this daemon, no logfiles) until it tries
again one minute later.

Any clues? It seems that this way of using the portmaster has been around
for a long time, so it must be possible to get it to work properly.

- Cheers
Kim Hendrikse
_____________________________________________________________________________
/ \
|Nexial Systems BV. E-mail: kim@nexial.nl |
| Ph: +31 475 551643 |
| Internet phone: phone.nexial.nl |
| (Intel Internet Video phone) |
| Fax: +31 475 551552 |
|St. Annastraat 4 |
|6109 RH |
|Ohe en Laak |
|The Netherlands |
| |
|http://www.nexial.nl |
\_____________________________________________________________________________/