I used the on-board serial port as a known working control (after getting it to work with the other onboard serial port) to try and connect over to one of the Syba card ports (using Cutecom & getty). The lines light up, but there's nothing getting sent from the 8-port as far as I can see. The onboard port works as I'd expect, the Syba (running getty identically from inittab) doesn't.
Is it possible to connect two ports and run getty on one port and minicom on
another ? We should check that UARTs are really working.