[techtalk] Serial line is looped back

[Helena A. Verrill]

Hi again,
 
thanks for answering my questions the other day.
I have another... 

I seem to have a problem with my laptop's modem (which is
a 3com PCMCIA card LAN/modem) I only got this problem after
upgrading to 2.3.99-pre3, and since I started 
using the card as a LAN card in my office as well
as a modem at home.  But I don't think it's a problem
with the upgrade, since now it happens even if I
boot to 2.2.14-5.0 instead.  (though there used to be
no problem).  The LAN is still working fine.  
Maybe I somehow set something wrongly for
the modem part when I added details in the network configurator
for the LAN connection - would a mistake there give the error I get?

The problem is that when I try to connect using kppp It gets to the point
where it's connecting to the network, but then I get a message saying it
can't find the ppp0 device.  Actually, it used to give this message just
one time, but then it would just continue with no problem.  Now it gives
the message infinitely many times (or at least until it gives up) and when
I click on the 'details' box kppp tells me that 
"Serial line is looped back"

I looked this up in the PPP-how to, but what it says there seems to
indicate this would be a problem with the peer, but I don't see how
that can be the case, since as far as I'm aware nothing with the
peer changed, and I can dial to it from my desktop exactly as before
with no problem.

I read another suggestion online that a solution could be to
reset the modem to the factory settings - though I'm not entirely
sure how to do this; doesn't seem to be any documentation about
that in what I got with the modem.  (which is windows documentation,
so maybe wouldn't help anyway).

also in /var/log/messages I have a message:
modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-22 
(plus other messages, such as
kernel: shmget: shm filesystem not mounted
don't know what the messages all mean, or which are relevant)

Maybe I need to reinstall the kernel and configure it differently
or something?

Any help very much appreciated,
Thanks very much,
Helena