In message <199506102313.TAA29911@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, "Charles M. Hannum" writes:
> 
>    Sending arbitrary CDB's from the command line is handy.  I'm not
>    sure what is so "*suck*"y about the interface; I guess Charles has
>    used it and found it a pain in the neck that everything within the
>    quotes is in hex and everything outside in decimal.
> 
> No; that's the least of the problems.  The most annoying problem is
> that, e.g/, a trivial typo can turn a CHANGE DEFINITION command into a
> FORMAT UNIT command -- definitely not what the user intended, and by
> the time he/she notices, it's way too late.
> 
> This is a very unsafe interface, and I would definitely not want
> random users to experiment with it.
> 

Hmm, I'm a random user, lemme interface with /dev/rsd0a... or /dev/mem,
or /dev/kmem... ;-)

IMHO, that is what permissions are for, to keep random users OUT.  If the
sys-admin is not smart enough to read a man page BEFORE he tries out a
command he knows nothing about, he deserves to be shot.

Also, I have had use for the power and functionality of such software
before, and would think it a benefit if they were incorporated into
the current distribution.  (Where did I need the power to send commands
directly to the drive?  An inopertune powerfailure interrupted a format
of a 4GB scsi drive.  When powered on, a probe would not detect the drive.
However, a scsi format command happened to be recognized by the drive,
and things were fine with the drive after it finished formating.


Just my $0.02...

--Toby.
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