-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hmm - after a reboot yesterday the order of my various /dev/video#'s have changed. I'm guessing this was related to the recent baselayout update (one of those reasons I always reboot within a few days after a baselayout change - I want to make sure I can reboot at all lest the system be down while I'm out of town). Or maybe it was due to this monthly udev update cron job that seems to get triggered nowadays.
Any ideas what might cause this to happen? It took a while to figure out what was happening - I run myth and all it knew is that the device it was trying to access wasn't initializing correctly. I figured the card had some issue, but it eventually turned out that I was addressing the wrong card and doing it in the wrong way. This seems to be one of those potential unix achilles-heels. Devices just have those generic /dev/devicename mknods, but there isn't anything that uniquely identifies a specific device. If these mknods change order then everything gets confused. I guess a solution would be to assign some kind of GUID to each device and use that to address them - but that of course gets rid of the elegance of the everything-is-a-file philosophy. Maybe create two links to the device - one with a classic name, and another which is a GUID-based filename, and software can use either one. I had a similar issue with a pair of USB serial ports I bought. Now, this is probably not linux's fault - but the devices had NO uniquely identifying info embedded in them as far as I could tell. So, I was very nervous about them switching around their mknods after reboots, after moving them around, etc. In the end I edited the udev configuration to create a second mknod for each device that was associated with the specific USB port they were plugged into (so much for plug-and-play). My understanding is that windows has the same problem with these sorts of devices - they work real great until you have a bunch of them. Does anybody know if a generic solution exists to these sorts of problems in linux, or how to mitigate these sorts of issues? With the increased usage of USB I'd think that situations like this will only come up more often... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFFzxBhG4/rWKZmVWkRAjDOAKDP4f+KaU/a+X7Cz79N9MGPLugX5QCgyUEp 9lA35LPJOpIx0D8ty4XvVyk= =tvvJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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