[Xastir] xastir woes / pk-88, tm-733, latest xastir- neither kiss nor tnc mode work.

[Curt Mills, WE7U]

On Fri, 8 Aug 2003, Dave Smith wrote:

> I've actually battled it out with aprsd for some time
> now and decided to give xastir a try because of the
> serial kiss support.
> 
> To make a long story short:
> 
> With minicom, I can communicate perfectly to/from the
> pk-88 and make contacts via the packet modem to
> others. So the radio/packet interface is all working.
> 
> I can't seem to get xastir to hear whats coming in
> from the tnc. I tried originally with a TNC serial
> mode, using a slightly modified AEA .sys file (i just
> removed stuff from the example that didnt work).

Does each packet come in as one line in minicom?  If each packet
comes in as two lines, you need to turn off HEADERLN or similar.


> I
> also just put the packet modem into KISS mode and
> tried serial kiss mode.  Same results.

Hmmm.  I wrote the serial KISS code, and I have two PK-88's,
one of which is my main TNC.  I assure you it can work, as
that's what I've been running.

My parameters for the serial KISS interface:
	/dev/ttyS1
	4800 bps
	TxD 40
	Persistence 20
	SlotTime 20
	TxTail	20

I'm not currently transmitting, so the kiss parameters may be off by
a bit.  The finals are blown on the radio here that I'm using.


> FYI, running the program as root, so permissions to
> the serial port shouldn't be a problem right now.

Please don't do that.  Instead, set up the group permissions for the
/dev/ttyS0 and ttyS1 ports so that you can use them.  Adding the user
to the uucp group will usually do it, and make sure the permissions
on the port are crw-rw----, owned by root, and group uucp.  Perhaps
on your system a different group is used.

Another option is to make the Xastir executable SUID root, by doing
this:

	chmod 4555 /usr/local/bin/xastir

Xastir can then run as root when it needs to (for accessing
interfaces), and drops permissions the rest of the time.  It's much
safer than running Xastir as the root user.

Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo.com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
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