Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sat, 14 Mar 1998 17:54:19 -0500 (EST)
From:      Robert Watson <robert@cyrus.watson.org>
To:        Burton Sampley <bsampley@best.com>
Cc:        "Michael V. Harding" <mvh@netcom.com>, stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: More problems with new slice code
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.3.96.980314174859.27517J-100000@trojanhorse.pr.watson.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980314115229.220D-100000@bsampley.vip.best.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sat, 14 Mar 1998, Burton Sampley wrote:

> To the best of my knowledge (if I'm wrong, will someone please correct
> me), the entries are not deleted, they just become invalid, ie, they *act*
> like they point to /dev/null or somewhere in outerspace.  I have been
> bitten by this in the past and have been quickly educated in the use of
> the fixit floppy/CDROM, which is actually a really cool tool to have! The
> pair have saved my butt a few times.  It seems kinda odd when I explicitly
> give "/dev/MAKEDEV sd0s2a" (and the rest of my file systems individually) 
> that it does what it needs to do to allow me to use that slice
> successfully, but "/dev/MAKEDEV all" makes the same slice no longer
> function.

That is what puzzled me, actually.  The device names were really gone from
/dev -- /dev/wd0a which had been happily there just sort of disappeared
after I did a MAKEDEV of the new devices.  I haven't looked enough at the
MAKEDEV script to know its depths though.

> I believe this has been corrected in -current, but I probably have my
> facts wrong.
> 
> I think all of us a one point in time have been a member of the
> head-scratching club.  That's part of the fun of using FreeBSD.  I just
> have a bad habit of learning at the worst possible time, like blowing up
> my system without a backup and all of my code for the quarter being on the
> unaccessible hard drive the week before finals.  :-)

Oh, I would certainly rather deal with just about any head-scratchy
moments in FreeBSD than run anything else.  We have over 8 machines
running FreeBSD of various forms in our apartment, and I do all
development for work under FreeBSD. :)  On the other hand, while I was
bitten by this bug, and knew how to deal with it, I pity a more novice
user who gets in that situation.  There are, of course, risks to running
-STABLE, but as it is currently a release candidate, we should try to
minimize those risks.  Having poked about at the code a bit where the
changes were, I accept that they were simplifying and helpful; it is
unfortunate, however, that the correction they provide to the code has
some side-effects.  sysinstall under 2.2.6 should definitely know how to
deal with this config and auto-magically do it (or request confirmation
first, but notify the user :).

  Robert N Watson 

Carnegie Mellon University http://www.cmu.edu/
SafePort Network Services  http://www.safeport.com/
robert@fledge.watson.org   http://www.watson.org/~robert/


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.BSF.3.96.980314174859.27517J-100000>