Paul Blackburn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> replies to
>> is there a possibility to create special devices, such as named pipes
>> in AFS?
saying:
> No. AFS does not support this. Why would you want to do this in /afs
> when you can always do it in the local filesystem (eg /tmp)?
It does make sense that AFS doesn't support special files.
Supporting special files means it would have to worry about mapping
major and minor device numbers between different OS's.
However, the reason why someone would want to do this is for Solaris,
and particularly, for programs that use "chroot".
There are 2 kinds of special files of particular interest:
/dev/zero is needed to load almost any program, even "ls".
this makes even anonymous ftp a challange
for solaris. (/dev/zero has the same major number
as /dev/mem.)
/dev/tcp, /dev/udp is needed for most socket code
Since it's true for Solaris, it's likely true of SGI and other SVR4
variants, such as unixware. Since they seem unlikely to go away,
and the same problem would likely exist in DFS (or might even
be worse, since DFS allows you to export UFS as well as LFS), it's
probably worth worrying about.
-Marcus Watts
UM ITD RS Umich Systems Group
