Let's Connect Our World

What this means depends on what program sent it. The modem could actually be in use (busy). Another cause reported for the SuSE distribution is that there may be two serial drivers present instead of one. One driver was built into the kernel and the second was a module.

In kppp, this message is sent when an attempt to get/set the serial port "stty" parameters fails. (It's similar to the "Input/output error" one may get when trying to use "stty -F /dev/ttySx"). To get a few of these stty parameters, the true address of the port must be known to the driver. So the driver may have the wrong address. The setserial" command will display what the driver thinks but it's likely wrong in this case. So what the "modem busy" often means is that the serial port (and thus the modem) can't be found.

If you have a pci modem, then use one of these commands: lspci -v, or cat /proc/pci, or dmesg to find the correct address and irq of the modem's serial port. Then check to see if "setserial" shows the same thing. If not, you need to run a script at boot-time which contains a setserial command that will tell the driver the correct address and irq.

Read Users' Comments (0)