Accessing disks via their serial numbers.

[Garance A Drosehn]

At 6:43 PM +0000 6/27/06, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>
>I don't think we should allow names that are not "under
>control", and by not "under control" I mean device names
>which the device driver writer doesn't control or at the
>very least sanitize.
>
>For instance, if you want to create names that match random
>strings, like the tape labels in your robot, the sensible
>and security concious device driver writer makes sure the
>names have a unique prefix:
>
>	/dev/tape/$label
>
>or similar, so that devfs(8) rules can be written in a
>surefire way.

This strikes me as a worthwhile idea.  Leave the device-
entries in /dev as they are now, but then create some
sub-directories which would hold the more arbitrary (or
"non-sanitized") names.
      /dev/info/disk/serial-num
or   /dev/info/geom/whatever

etc.  That way there's only one new entry in /dev, and
people could just de-permit that directory (or turn the
feature off) if they didn't want or need to have that
extra info available.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =               drosehn at rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer               or   gad at FreeBSD.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;             Troy, NY;  USA