serial ports no longer working after upgrade to RedHat 9

From: Bruce Pennypacker (bruce_at_pennypacker.org)
Date: 10/25/03 

Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2003 18:51:57 -0400

Hi all,

I have two systems that were both recently upgraded to RedHat 9. One
was a laptop running both RedHat 8 and Win2K in dual-boot mode. The
other is a server that was running RedHat 7.3. Both were recently
upgraded to RedHat 9, and since then neither of them have been able to
access their respective serial ports. In trying to determine what had
happened I noticed that the permissions of /dev/ttyS? had been changed.
  On an existing 7.3 system they look like this:

crw-rw---- 1 root uucp 4, 64 Apr 11 2002 ttyS0
crw-rw---- 1 root uucp 4, 65 Oct 24 18:46 ttyS1

But on the upgraded RH9 machines they looked like this:

crw------- 1 root root 4, 64 Oct 21 12:33 ttyS0
crw------- 1 root root 4, 65 Oct 21 12:33 ttyS1

I don't know if this was a major problem or not but I changed the
permissions back anyway. No matter what I've tried, however, I've been
unable to access either serial port since the upgrade. When the systems
boot up they do see the ports. The syslog shows the following:

Oct 24 17:22:56 homer kernel: ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
Oct 24 17:22:56 homer kernel: ttyS01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A

Yet whenever I try to use minicom it simply fails to do anything, and
mingetty results in the following in the syslog:

Oct 24 18:51:16 homer mingetty[954]: /dev/ttyS0: cannot open tty:
Operation not permitted
Oct 24 18:51:26 homer mingetty[956]: /dev/ttyS1: cannot open tty:
Operation not permitted

Any thoughts as to what might be happening?

-Bruce

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