> >>>>> "Phil" == Phil Knaack <flipk@ncremp.ag.iastate.edu> writes:
> 
> Phil> 	Problems: how do you detect insertion of the device? Many
> Phil> floppies (i understand) have a door switch; perhaps this could
> Phil> be monitored? I suspect this would require a kernel
> Phil> modification. And as for ZIP drives, does it create any
> Phil> particular messages upon device insertion? This sounds like it
> Phil> would require a kernel modification as well to detect.
> 
> 	From the Amiga world, which uses standard 720K PC floppies,
> you must step the head to determine if a disk is present.  This is the
> source of the Amiga floppy click.  Amigas also poll removable SCSI
> media once each second for media change.
> 
> 	The SGI has a 'mediad' running to do a similar solution.
> Wouldn't automount be a better solution to this delema?

Mach-Ten uses a `mountd' process that also does similar. When you insert
a disk, it becomes available under `/'.  (unsure about details)

Now a little switch gets depressed in the drive and either the 
macos polls this switch, or it generates an interrupt... Nice if it
generated an interrupt... But i do not know for sure.

I guess the proper place for detecting media insertion would be in the
device driver... standard interfaces for this i do not know about, but
would expect something like an extra daemon running to check this.

d

-- 
David Leonard                            BE(Comp)/BCompSc 5th year student
The University of Queensland             s160828@student.uq.edu.au
perl -e 'for $c(split(//,"BILLGATES\003")){$s+=ord($c)};print $s."\n"'