FreeBSD 5.3-BETA6 available

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 01:13:47 +0200
> From: Radek Kozlowski <radek at raadradd.com>
> 
> On Mon, Sep 27, 2004 at 03:29:37PM -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> > > Put something like this in your devfs.rules:
> > > 
> > > [system=10]
> > > add path uscanner0 mode 660
> > > 
> > > and add the following line to rc.conf:
> > > 
> > > devfs_system_ruleset="system"
> > 
> > Thanks for the tip. But where is this documented? I can't find a
> > reference to devfs.rules or to the devfs_system_ruleset variable. 
> 
> Well, I can't find it in any man page, so the only pointers are
> /etc/defaults/devfs.rules and what's in /etc/defaults/rc.conf:
> 
> raadradd at ddardaar:~> grep ^devfs /etc/defaults/rc.conf
> devfs_rulesets="/etc/defaults/devfs.rules /etc/devfs.rules" # Files containing
> devfs_system_ruleset="" # The name of a ruleset to apply to /dev
> devfs_set_rulesets=""   # A list of /mount/dev=ruleset_name settings to

A little reading of /etc/rc.d/devfs helps explain quite a bit, too. It's
a very clever system, but probably most FreeBSD users are unaware of how
to use it or what its capabilities are. Thanks to your postings, the
awareness has expanded a bit.

> > And, do you know if devfs.rules can create links such as are created
> > by devfs.conf? I want to have /dev/cdrom and /dev/dvd symlinked to my
> > DVD drive when I attach it.
> 
> I think devfs.conf is the right place for it (assuming /dev/acd0 is your
> dvd drive):
> 
> link	acd0	dvd
> link	acd0	cdrom

I think you missed my point on the creation of symlinks. I have them in
devfs.conf, but those operations are only done at boot time. If I have
no DVD in my system at boot time and add one later, I need to manually
create the symlinks. 

No, this is not horrible, but it should be possible to automate it when
the device (/dev/acd0) is created. I don't see any provision for this in
devfs.rules. Now that I have thought about it a bit, I suspect that I
can do the job with devd instead of devfs. I'll give it a try today if I
get a little time.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634