I had the opportunity to reorganize my local machines. As part of that, I wanted to plug my firewall’s serial port into USB serial and pop that into my server. I have a CP2104 serial device that I bought with my PC Engines apu2 which I use for a firewall.
The USB serial device worked fine when plugged into my Windows 8 laptop, but I want my server to be able to connect to my firewall even when the network is down. Because the apu2 is headless, it’s nice to have something that’s plugged into a monitor when I need to fix things.
I plugged the USB serial port in, and tried to connect to my firewall with minicom. I got this instead:
$ minicom
minicom: cannot open /dev/ttyUSB0: Device or resource busy
So, time to look at who has /dev/ttyUSB0 open:
$ sudo lsof | grep ttyUSB0
gpsd 416 root 3u CHR 188,0 0t0 176 /dev/ttyUSB0
Ok, why is gpsd holding /dev/ttyUSB0 open? It’s true I have a GPS attached to my server, but that runs as /dev/ttyACM0 and has nothing to do with /dev/ttyUSB0. Hmm… time to search and find this in the gpsd FAQ: Why does GPSD open non-GPS USB devices?
That made me suspicious. See, gpsd is trying to be too friendly - and to do that, it opens a whole bunch of possibly GPS devices even if they’re not GPS devices! Could that be my problem?
$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 008 Device 003: ID 10c4:ea60 Cygnal Integrated Products, Inc. CP210x UART Bridge / myAVR mySmartUSB light
Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 040: ID 1546:01a7 U-Blox AG
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Hmm… let’s take a peek in /lib/udev/rules.d/60-gpsd.rules:
... blah blah blah...
# Cygnal Integrated Products, Inc. CP210x Composite Device (Used by Holux m241 and Wintec grays2 wbt-201) [linux module: cp210x]
ATTRS{idVendor}=="10c4", ATTRS{idProduct}=="ea60", SYMLINK+="gps%n", TAG+="systemd", ENV{SYSTEMD_WANTS}="gpsdctl@%k.service"
... more blah...
So in an effort to detect the Holux m241 and Wintec grays2 wbt-201, it’s matching the vendor and product ID of my CP2104 serial device as well! Luckily, I don’t have any of those GPS devices, so a quick snip:
# Cygnal Integrated Products, Inc. CP210x Composite Device (Used by Holux m241 and Wintec grays2 wbt-201) [linux module: cp210x]
# commented out because it interferes with Andrew's PC Engines 2104 USB serial cable
#ATTRS{idVendor}=="10c4", ATTRS{idProduct}=="ea60", SYMLINK+="gps%n", TAG+="systemd", ENV{SYSTEMD_WANTS}="gpsdctl@%k.service"
was all it took. Now my USB serial device shows up as a serial device, and is not held open by a GPS daemon.
I have to disagree with the GPSD FAQ’s statement, “It’s not a problem we can solve with clever programming, the devices simply don’t yield enough information about themselves to avoid conflicts.” Err, no… clever programming would have the user run through an install procedure which involved plugging the device in, and detecting the device. Then they could update the udev rules so that only the device that a user owned was stolen by gpsd, and not all serial devices on the planet that happened to match a vendor/product ID that they knew about.