Strange devfs Warnings

[Per Hedeland]

On 2019-11-14 15:56, B J wrote:
> I have a laptop machine that's giving me some strange warnings about devfs.
> 
> When I installed the version of FreeBSD that runs on it, as well as
> Xfce as the desktop, I edited /etc/devfs.rules with:
> 
> [localrules = 5]

The spaces around '=' here are causing the "you must specify ..."
warnings. devfs.rules(5) says:

      In the brackets should be the name of the ruleset and its
      number, separated by an equal sign.

> add path 'da*' mode 0600 group operator
> 
> and added this to /etc/rc.conf:
> 
> devfs_system_ruleset="localrules"
> 
> (I started doing this several years ago with an earlier version of
> FreeBSD with Gnome 2 as the desktop so that I could mount USB drives.)
> 
> I get the following while booting the machine:
> 
> /etc/rc.d/devfs: WARNING: devfs_init_rulesets: could not read rules
> from /etc/defaults/devfs.rules

Hm, /etc/defaults/devfs.rules is only readable by root:

-rw-------  1 root  wheel  2466 Dec  7  2018 /etc/defaults/devfs.rules

- but surely /etc/rc.d/devfs is run as root when you boot... - strange.

FWIW, I have (on 12.0-RELEASE) a similar setup (as do probably many
others, since it's basically the man page example), and while I can
verify the breakage from spaces around '=', i don't get any warning
about /etc/defaults/devfs.rules. Do you actually have that file?

> /etc/rc.d/devfs: WARNING: devfs_set_ruleset: you must specify a ruleset number
> /etc/rc.d/devfs: WARNING: devfs_apply_ruleset: you must specify a ruleset
> 
> I'm not sure what's going on and what I should do to fix this.  The
> reason I'm asking is that I want to set up that laptop machine to run
> a scanner and a printer and I believe I have to edit /etc/devfs.rules
> for that.

Well, you *may* need something in /etc/devfs.rules, but I doubt that
it is what you currently have there. /dev/da* is for SCSI devices (see
da(4)), and perhaps (but not likely) your scanner and printer present
themselves as such - but as far as I can see, the only effect of your
line would be to remove group read access, since the default
permissions are:

crw-r-----  1 root  operator  0x9a Oct  2 02:47 /dev/da0
crw-r-----  1 root  operator  0x9b Oct  2 02:47 /dev/da0s1

Back when I had a USB-connected printer/scanner combo, I used

add path 'usb/*' mode 666

- a bit "lax", but it was OK for my purposes. If you print/scan over
the network (as I do these days), you don't need anything there.

--Per Hedeland