Blue Heat/PCI Software Installation Guide for Solaris

Making a Driver Diskette

  • Download the driver diskette image file from the Blue Heat/PCI product page.
  • Untar the floppy disk image.
  • By default, there is a system process called vold that is enabled at boot time.
    vold” is Solaris’ Volume Management system. How you access the floppy drive depends on whether or not vold is currently running.
  • To find out if vold is running on your system:
    # ps -ef | grep vold | grep -v grep
  • If vold is running, you will see a line similar to the one displayed below:
    root 245 14:45:05 /usr/bin/vold
  • If vold is running:
    # volcheck
    # dd if=sol-bh-XXX.dd-image of=/vol/dev/aliases/floppy0
  • If vold is not running:
    # dd if=sol-bh-XXX.dd-image of=/dev/fd0
    Where XXX is the driver version

Installing the Driver

  • # volcheck
  • # pkgadd -d /vol/dev/aliases/floppy0
  • When asked to select the package to install, type 1 if you are installing the driver on i386 platform, or 2 on a SPARC machine
  • Follow instructions
  • Once the installation is done, a message appears indicating whether or not the installation was successful

Uninstalling the Driver

  • # pkgrm CTI-bhX Where X is either i for i386 or s for SPARC
  • Type y when asked if you want to remove this package
  • Once the uninstall is done, a message appears indicating whether or not the uninstallation was successful

Blue Heat Serial Devices

The devices are created as /dev/ttybhXX, /dev/term/bhXX and /dev/cua/bhXX. The ttybhXX devices are links to the term/bhXX devices. XX is the port number, which corresponds to the minor number of the device.
Make sure the following lines are present in /etc/uucp/Devices

Direct /dev/ttybhxx – Any direct

Direct cua/bhxx – Any direct

Solaris goes to a great deal of trouble to keep the users’ view of the hardware consistent. So much so that Solaris tracks the slot a PCI card is plugged into. If you make even the slightest change to your hardware setup, even just moving the Blue Heat card to a different PCI slot, you may have to perform an extra step to get the devices to be created properly.

One way is to perform a reconfigure reboot while making the hardware change. There are two ways this can be accomplished:

Method 1:
# touch /reconfigure
# reboot

Method 2:
# reboot
Select (b)oot or (i)nterpreter: b -r

Another way is to reload the driver with the supplied utility bh_reload (look in /opt/CTI-bhX):
# ./bh_reload

A reconfigure reboot may leave extra unused devices in /dev. We recommend using the reload utility as it ensures only the correct devices are created.

After this you may find that the device numbers have moved. What was ttybh00 might now be ttybh08 for example. This is a side-effect of Solaris’ hardware tracking and can’t be avoided.

Configuration File

Changes to the driver configuration file /kernel/drv/bh.conf won’t be picked up until a reboot or a driver reload. Use the provided script bh_reload to perform a reload of the driver. This will interrupt any progams or users using Blue Heat ports.
bh.conf contains documentation on the various flags that can be set.

RS485 Modes

The Blue Heat includes support for Full Duplex, Half Duplex and Multi-Drop Slave modes. Connect Tech provides the “set485” utility to enable and disable these modes.
The default mode is Full Duplex, so you will only need to invoke the set485 command if you need to run in Half Duplex or Multi-Drop Slave modes (look in /opt/CTI-bhX).

Testing the Newly Installed Ports

You can use the utility ‘cu’ to test the installed ports.
# cu -l cua/bhxx

This will ‘connect’ with the port and allow you to send and receive data.
Utilities like stty will allow you change other serial parameters (baud rate, parity, flow control, etc…) for testing.

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