Idea re: modem detection

[Erik Walthinsen <omega@omegacs.net>]

I was consulting for a friend of mine who has a Juno account.  Every time 
you want to add a user or do just about anything else, it asks you for 
information about your modem.  It also dials the various Juno servers once 
for almost *every* operation you do (like the wrong password..), but that's 
a different matter entirely, and I'll be yelling at them later about it.

Anyway, I had a thought regarding modem detection.  Connect to the serial 
port at some reasonable speed, type AT, wait for OK.  Drop serial line rate 
until you get the OK.  Now, attempt to print out the settings (at&v or 
something?, I forget) and record them somewhere.  If that worked, reset the 
modem to factory defaults (at&r or whatever), read them, and start 
comparing to a large list of modems with their default values until you 
either find one modem, or a range in which you can't narrow it anymore.  
Then start trying little details specific to each modem until you narrow it 
down as far as you can.  Then present the user a list.  Oh, and put the 
settings back where you found them, plz? :-)

For some of the more esoteric modems, this method might detect them 
precisely, which is an advantage since these are the modems people likely 
won't be able to identify by brand/model.  For the rest, you've either 
narrowed it enough to make the selection process trivial, or you've decided 
"hey, this is generic enough for my needs, why am I bothering to do this?". 
No matter what, you have enough information to do all the basic stuff 
anyone would want to do under Linux.  If not, they'd better know what kind 
of modem it is.

Would someone out there like to code something to do this?  Or work on 
auto-detection routines for other bits of hardware?  We really should be 
able to detect just about anything, and anything we can't ID right away is 
probably out there on the net somewhere.  For the SEUL install, if we have 
a modem handy and configured for the 'net, it would be simple to dial up 
and grab the deltas between their list and the more up-to-date list.  
Eventually we could even have a 1-888 number they could dial... (hey, I can 
dream, can't I?)

TIA,
   Omega


     Erik Walthinsen <omega@seul.org> - SEUL Project system architect
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