From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Jan 8 10:38:24 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com [24.2.89.207]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7CCA8152E4 for ; Sat, 8 Jan 2000 10:38:19 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com) Received: (from cjc@localhost) by cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id NAA04360 for freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG; Sat, 8 Jan 2000 13:42:48 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from cjc) From: "Crist J. Clark" Message-Id: <200001081842.NAA04360@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> Subject: Re: i386/15961: No keyboard import possible after floppy drive error -- a brain-damaged workaround In-Reply-To: <200001081312.OAA23673@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de> from Oliver Fromme at "Jan 8, 2000 02:12:21 pm" To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 13:42:48 -0500 (EST) Reply-To: cjclark@home.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL54 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Oliver Fromme wrote, [Charset ISO-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...] > Salvo Bartolotta wrote in list.freebsd-questions: > >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< > >> >Synopsis: System allows no keyboard input after floppy drive > > error > >> >Severity: serious > >> >Priority: low > >> >Responsible: freebsd-bugs > >> >State: open > > > >> >Description: > > > >> After erroneously having mounted a write-protected floppy without -r > >> option (i.e. read-writable), a write attempt on the floppy results in > >> the system ignoring keyboard input (w/o any further I/O activity), > > even > >> Ctrl-Alt-Del (as explicitly allowed in the kernel config). The system > >> didn't appear to hang as a whole; one could switch between the virtual > >> consoles. > > I guess the submitter did the usual mistake and used the > block device (/dev/fd*), not the raw device (/dev/rfd*). > If that's true, I'd suggest that the PR gets closed, because > it was just a pilot error. I was under the impression the block device is what one uses for 'mount' commands. That's what I always see in fstab. I recently had a user resort to rebooting a machine when he tried mounting a write-protected floppy. I'm telling the sysadmin who gave that guy root to mount his floppy not to give that luser root anymore. ;) I cannot find reference to block or character devices in the mount* manpages. They like to call them "special" files, very helpful terminology. However, newfs(8) uses "special" files too, and I know that you give it a raw device. However, the above advice is valid for situations like, % tar cf /dev/fd0c stuff And % tar cf /dev/rfd0c stuff The first form can do Very Bad Things when the floppy is write-protected, while the second will fail harmlessly with a useful error message. -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@home.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message