Re: Of removable devices

From: Horst von Brand (vonbrand@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl)
Date: Wed Feb 16 2000 - 22:51:39 EST


Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@mandrakesoft.com> said:
> Horst von Brand wrote:

[...]

> > > Floppy insert -> 'volcheck' causes mount

> > And hangs hard (or screams at you) if it happens not to be formatted, or
> > part of a multivolume tarball, or a non-MSDOS diskette. At least some
> > versions of SunOS got wedged and the floppy drive became unusable until the
> > next reboot.

> I never had a hang, maybe you should apply patches. :)

Not recently. First order of bussiness when setting up Solaris is to get
rid of vold, and install mtools. After gcc and bash, obviously ;-)

> One expects an unformatted disk or unrecognizable format to fail in some
> way.

It used to fail horribly, until I got fed up. Nowadays I indulge in Linux
on my SPARC.

> > > Floppy eject -> command "eject floppy" (and mechanically eject if
> > > necessary)

> > Mechanically retaining the floppy is not there for PCs, sorry.

> ya think?

Not on any PC I have ever seen.

> > This idea sounds nice, but is _extremly_ hard to get to work right. How do
> > you format a diskette with this kind of setup? Do a rawrite? Create/use
> > multivolume tarballs? Handle different (perhaps even alien) filesystems,
> > esp. one that is handled by userlevel programs (something like mtools(1))?

> if mounted by vold: use as mounted fs
> if not mounted: use device directly, 'fdformat /dev/fd0' etc.

Pop in a floppy that you want to format. Oops, was formated with MSDOS, no
way to _not_ mount it to get to point (b).

> How difficult is that?

ESP required, minimum. The opcode RUM (Read User's Mind) hasn't been
implemented, AFAIK.

> vold, volcheck and other Solaris tools are really minimal extensions to
> automount. No big deal or rocket science, and not hard to get right.
> The toughest thing is training the users...

That is the part that should _not_ be required at all. Going half the way
here is worse than not even starting down that road, IMVHO.

-- 
Horst von Brand                             vonbrand@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl
Casilla 9G, Viņa del Mar, Chile                               +56 32 672616

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