I've been trying to understand the headache that Jim mentions relating to the lack of devfs support in SuSE zinux. All that devfs buys you is the ability to refer to the device address rather than some drive letter in non-devfs, and the fact that drive letters get reallocated when device addresses are removed and/or added. Thus the real issue is being able to use an fstab that contains specific device addresses rather than drive letters, right?
If I were in the position of managing 40 linux LPARs and needed something similar to devfs I would probably resort to scripting my own /etc/fstab before the "mount -a"(s) were issued in the boot scripts. All such a personal script would need to do would be to use /proc/dasd/devices and /proc/partitions and some pseudo fstab as input (maybe one that assumed devfs for syntax), then substitute the device numbers and partition numbers in it with /dev/dasda1 etc. Of course this assumes you need to run on every boot, if it's just a matter of producing the non-devfs fstab once in a while when the dasd configuration changes it becomes basic sysadmin work ;-) Not trivial, but not rocket science either.... (contracts always available) Ciao Mark -----Original Message----- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of John Summerfield Sent: 15 October 2002 03:30 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Antwort: Max number of dasd devices On Tue, 15 Oct 2002 08:51, you wrote: > Just as I thought - Linux is more interested in some notion of > "cleanliness" rather than real user problems! devfs has already been > coded and is available for zSeries users who need some relief. I've > been struggling with this idiotic dev node system for 2 years on up to > 40 linux LPARS and I can tell you from hard experience that "niceness" > and what might happen in the future hasn't been the least bit of help > in dealing with several thousands devices. > Excuse the frankness but the linux solution is neither clean or easy to > use IMNSHO. > > > The net effect of this linux approach, in reality, is that all machines > should look like a PCs rather than Linux being flexible enough to > provide special solutions for special problems. Why don't you put the question to your Linux vendor? I have heard that devfs isn't all it was hoped to be and the RH will not support it, that "something better" is coming. Unfortunately, I can't recall anything specific. Perhaps Alan can enlighten us, or tell be I've been enjoying forbidden substances. I do have the impression the SCSI world is going from bananas to worse; I hot-plugged in a Firewire drive and it came up at /dev/sda, and apparently USB cameras have been known to appear at /dev/sda too, and that sounds to me like a serious headache for the PC world. -- Cheers John Summerfield Microsoft's most solid OS: http://www.geocities.com/rcwoolley/ Join the "Linux Support by Small Businesses" list at http://mail.computerdatasafe.com.au/mailman/listinfo/lssb
