External serial modem suddenly not connecting anymore

[kaens]

Alright, so I have a external serial modem, it has worked fine up until now. Last night, there was a thunderstorm and we had two power outages in pretty quick succession. I restart my computer, did a quick fsck, and everything seems fine.

Except one thing.

My modem won't connect anymore. It's attached to ttyS0, and when I run pon it just sits there. plog shows that it's sitting there waiting for OK and never getting it. Twice. it looks like this (paraphrased):

send ATZ:
expect (OK)
alarm
send AT
expect (OK)
alarm
script ip-up failed.

I am assuming that alarm means time-out, since it only appears after aboiut a minute of waiting, and that ATZ and AT are different initialization strings for the modem.

I know that the phone cable going to the modem is fine, because I plugged a phone into it and got a dial tone. I assume that the serial port is fine because otherwise it wouldn't be able to even get that far in the ip-up script, right? I don't happen to have anything else I could use to verify that the serial port is fine (unless there's some command line test I could do to check...my knowledge of the huge repository of command line tools is far from complete.)

I am running Ubuntu Warty.

So any ideas?

[junme]

it's broken

[drakebasher]

it's broken

Yeah, could be. If you don't have surge protection for the modem, that's a good chance. Maybe you should open the modem case and see if there are damaged components before you sell the modem on eBay (okay, that's not funny.)