5.3.2 Lock files

Kermit et.al. cannot dial out while mgetty is running (modem responses are eaten by mgetty)—what’s wrong?

Most propably, you have not configured the LOCK and LOCKS_BINARY defines in policy.h properly. Make sure that the lockfiles kermit (or cu, pcomm, seyon,…) expect are in the path specified in LOCK and set LOCKS_BINARY to 1 if they do not write the PID of the locking process in ascii (10 bytes) to the lock file but as a 4-byte integer instead. Mgetty and Sendfax will understand both types of lock files, but if LOCKS_BINARY is not set properly, other programs may not understand the lock file.

Also, make sure that both processes use the same name for the device. (i.e., mgetty locking /dev/ttyS0 and kermit locking /dev/modem will definitely fail.)