Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 14:35:26 -0700 (PDT) From: jin@george.lbl.gov To: bmah@CA.Sandia.GOV Cc: bmah@california.sandia.gov, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee Subject: Re: SCSI disk naming problem Message-ID: <199910012135.OAA24213@george.lbl.gov>
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bmah@CA.Sandia.GOV wrote: } > > That's an interesting argument on the part of a few people. The } > > commercial UNIX I first adminned had wired down, short names for disks } > > (rz0, rz1, rz2, ... ). This was very nice. } > } > This one does not resolve the controller problem either as } > narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee said. } > } > So, I guess dac0t0, dac0t1, ... dac3t4, will be good enough if we want } > to be short, but anything shorter than this will be meaningless. } } Well...I personally prefer the short names. On systems with multiple } controllers, the commercial UNIX I used (Ultrix) just continued its } numbering with rz0, rz1, rz2, ..., rz6, rz7, rz8, ... FreeBSD lets you } do exactly the same thing. The thing is what is rz44 representing? If kernel spits: "rz44 hardware error 105: write failure -- replace it" Which disk are you going to shutdown and replace without looking at /etc/fstab or /sys/i386/conf/CRUEENT_RUN ? What happens if when you see the message and the host is hosed and needs to be rebooted -- at this time both above files are not available -- ? I do not think dac5t4 is that worse than rz44 (just two charaters long). Maybe it is better. You immediately know the disk with ID 4 on the SCSI controller 5 is one having trouble. If you have just one disk, I think two charaters will not be a big deal anyway. However, it will be great help to identify the disk by this two charaters. } Having long device names is confusing to users who only have one disk } controller (and I'd bet this is the vast majority). It took me a long Yes or No. I know at least 7-10 sites running 50 - 100 nodes of FreeBSD. I believe there are much more than I know. How many FreeBSD servers are running in this world? A single node FreeBSD server on this planet can be a lot. A single disk FreeBSD users could be the majority at this monment, do we want more and more FreeBSD servers runnning around the world? So, we should think about the future. } time to grok the syntax of Solaris device names and I still get confused } about this. Commercial or free doesn't have anything to do with this } issue...this scheme would force users to remember and type extra } is good. (I did } miss a message or two in the middle of your discussion, apparently, and } that may have contributed to my apparently confusion.) } } But I think your proposed long names are confusing, and I claim that } that rebuilding a kernel to get wired-down device names is easy. } } Perhaps I am misunderstanding what you mean when you say "by hand". I'm } envisioning an environment where you have a lot of similarly-configured } machines. So you build a kernel (based on GENERIC) to wire down } devices ONE TIME, and distribute that kernel out to all the different } machines. If kernel can do this automatically, no one has to rebuild the kernel any more, and no one has to remember every thing that may reduce sys-admin costs. This is special for new users/sys-admins. I personal built 1MB script to setup FreeBSD over the 10 years. It is easy for me to add a couple of lines for wired down the SCSI disk name. But, what is about for the new suers and new sys-admins. Should we make things more easier for them? } > Because it is FreeWare so we cannot do some thing good } > as commercial UNIXs do? } } I don't understand this argument. "Free" (i.e. open source) vs. } commercial doesn't have anything to do with this issue. This was some one screamed a couple of years ago. When I pointed out we can do something good like commercial company doing, and one person jumped on top of me and said that Hey, this is FreeWare,but not commercial software, why we should do things like commercial company does? I was scared I had bad approching for FreeWare. Now I think there is nothing wrong if we can use some good idea from any one including commercial sector. So, that is why I would like to tune the name on SCSI disks. -Jin To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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