From owner-freebsd-doc Thu Jul 13 21:40:50 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Received: from cx587235-a.chnd1.az.home.com (cx587235-a.chnd1.az.home.com [24.11.88.170]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 851DF37BAC9; Thu, 13 Jul 2000 21:40:43 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jjreynold@home.com) Received: from whale.home-net (whale [192.168.1.2]) by cx587235-a.chnd1.az.home.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id VAA97861; Thu, 13 Jul 2000 21:40:43 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from jjreynold@home.com) Received: (from jjreynold@localhost) by whale.home-net (8.9.3/8.9.3) id VAA44626; Thu, 13 Jul 2000 21:40:42 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from jjreynold@home.com) From: John Reynolds MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14702.39370.781772.894664@whale.home-net> Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 21:40:42 -0700 (MST) To: doc@freebsd.org Subject: chapter about using the fixit floppy? X-Mailer: VM 6.73 under Emacs 20.7.1 Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Sender: owner-freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org [ cc'ing to -hackers because some content may be relavent outside -doc ] Hello all, Is there a chapter of the Handbook that details how to use the "fixit" floppy? I moved a disk from controller to controller yesterday and in doing so rendered my system unbootable (ad4 went to ad0, fstab is hosed, ooops) because I forgot to change /etc/fstab before shutting down. Rather than just temporarily putting the controller back, rebooting, changing /etc/fstab then moving it again I decided to get some worth out of those CDs I bought (grin :), get my hands dirty, and use the "fixit" option. IMO, it seems like the "fixit" shell one is given via this option (and I suppose by using the "fixit.flp" image) is more difficult to "use" than it should be. I don't profess to be the expert-of-all-gods in FreeBSD but I've sysadmin'ed SunOS boxes and been dorking with FreeBSD since 2.0.5, so I wouldn't consider myself a "newbie" to Unix. Still, it took me a while before I was able to mount my root partition so I could edit the lousy etc/fstab file. I knew the partition I wanted was ad0s1a but there was no device file for this partition in /dev or /dist/dev (aka /mnt2/dev I believe). So, I copied over MAKEDEV from /dist/dev and after seeing reference to using the $MAKEDEVPATH variable I was able to get MAKEDEV to work with a single edit--mknod is hard coded in there as /sbin/mknod but inside the "fixit" shell, mknod is reached through /mnt2/sbin/mknod (there were other trivialities like symlinking /dist/etc/group to /etc/group so mknod wouldn't complain about the group 'operator' not existing, etc.). So, my questions are two-fold: 1) Can we/shouldn't we populate the CD's /dev with every entry that could be created with MAKEDEV (including all the partitions that can be within slices of a disk)? If that were the case, then all I would have had to do was "mount -t ufs /mnt2/dev/ad0s1a /whatever" and went about my business editing. 2) If this is NOT a good thing to do, can we/should we make MAKEDEV not point to /sbin/mknod but rather to something in the path? At that point it should be trivial to write a section of the handbook detailing that all somebody needs to do to make devices is: cd /dev MAKEDEVPATH=$PATH; export MAKEDEVPATH sh /mnt2/dev/MAKEDEV whatever0 and they could then begin the business of fixing what needed fixing. If populating the CD's (and/or fixit floppy's) /dev with all known devices isn't the correct thing to do, I can provide patches to MAKEDEV if that's the correct route as well as a section for the handbook (at least in ASCII--I'll need help sgml'ing it). I'm looking for input from people. Perhaps it was just too late last night and I'm being dense (i.e. is the "fixit" procedure really this 'difficult' to use). Comments? Thanks, -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= John Reynolds Chandler Capabilities Engineering, CDS, Intel Corporation jreynold@sedona.ch.intel.com My opinions are mine, not Intel's. Running jjreynold@home.com FreeBSD 3.5-STABLE. FreeBSD: The Power to Serve. http://members.home.com/jjreynold/ Come join us!!! @ http://www.FreeBSD.org/ =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message