When things finally click in the brain and work on the machine, happy things happen!

I keep adding to my home automation server. This time I got an old ISA modem. Found it in the piles of cards in my chicken coop (which I use for computer storage now). And I got caller ID working on it.

Setting Up the Modem

If your modem already works, skip this!
Had to get the modem detected and IRQs all set right. Yup, it's that old! Found a free IRQ by running

and set the modem jumper as such.

To detect the modem in Linux, I used wvdialconf. For newer (PCI) modems, I suggest using ScanModem

And then run

If all works, it should save your modem's configuration to

My modem was found on /dev/ttyS1

Setting up Mgetty

Now the fun part. I'm using Mgetty to get the caller ID info. (install mgetty-voice for vgetty - if you want to create an answering machine)

Setup mgetty.config

Here's my mgetty.conf (change port to the serial port your modem is attached to)

Here's what happens - After the phone rings twice, it calls the cnd-program script and passes 3 arguments - Serial Port, Phone Number, and Caller ID Name. If the script returns status 0, mgetty will pick up the call. If the script returns 1, mgetty will not answer, and the phone will keep ringing. I've set my script to always return 1, because I do not want mgetty to answer my phone!

Mgetty doesn't run automatically, so we'll use ustart to do so:

Put in the following contents. This will start mgetty on the specified runlevels, and restart mgetty if it is ever killed.
Change /dev/ttyS1 to your modem!

And now you can start mgetty:

Mgetty should now be running and listening for incoming phone calls. It will run the script you specified in mgetty.config under cnd-program after 2 rings.
Here's my example run_on_ring.sh:

There you go! Hope it works!