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On Sat, 4 Aug 2007, Czerno wrote:
> The naive question comes to mind, why doesn't Linux itself create
> "nodes" as required ? I checked "dmesg", and sure the system detects
> <hdb5> at boot time. Shouldn't it "mknod" accordingly by itself ?

So far as I can see, this was a long-running dilemma for Linux. The 
original solution was to have the system autocreate every imaginable 
device file (all those entries under /dev are known as device files) on 
system start-up. This meant that the computer ended up with a /dev 
directory full of entries, 99% of which would never be used. You can 
likely appreciate the heightened need for a solution that works more 
effectively and dynamically with the proliferation of hot-pluggable drives 
and storage media (e.g., flash drives, digital cameras and music players, 
etc.). Later in the 2.4.x kernel series they came up with ways of doing 
something like what you suggest (auto-creating needed /dev entries at boot 
time or on connection of said device to the system). The current solution 
that works pretty well in the 2.6.x kernel series is called udev. That 
won't work for the 2.2.x kernel BL uses though, and may have undesireable 
overhead even if it did. As you will be aware, I am only giving background 
information here rather than providing any solution. Sorry :)

> And to add a new one :
> I have : "mount /dev/sbpcd0 /cdr" in my /etc/rc script; if the CDROM
> tray
> is empty at boot time (as it usually will be) then the system retries
> 3 or
> 4 times before abandoning the mount operation. It's a small
> annoyance, is
> it possible though to make the "mount" line conditional so that it is
> not
> attempted or at least not retried if no CD is in the device ?

Under BL I think your best solution is going to be to transfer that line 
from from /etc/rc to /etc/fstab and to add a little more info to it. I 
would say it should look something like

----------------------------------------------------
/dev/sbpcd0 /cdr   iso9660 user,noauto     0       0
----------------------------------------------------

That would keep the drive from being mounted by the system at boot-up, 
regardless of whether there is a CD in it or not. You would mount the CD 
drive by issuing the command mount /cdr. You could alias that command if 
you didn't want to have to type so much to mount it. Hope that helps.

James