Warning: gratuitous self plug follows ;-)

According to C Kane:
>
>Using a link misses the point.  I want nailed-down names so device-
>renaming does not occur on bootup.
>

As others have stated, you can nail these devices in the config.  The
abc tool I released for testing last week will actually
_automatically_ nail any disks that are present for you.

>Another thing is that if we have a limit of 8 bits for the minor
>number, there can be only 32 nailed-down devices.
>

with current technologies, this appears to be a reasonable
limitation...

>
>If I added a tape drive, I could manually create c1t3d0 (for example;
>this would not go away even if the tape were not present on next
>reboot), and immediately access the tape device.
>

<feh> if we are talking commercial vendors then Sun don't even force
you to make the device node.

The ability to rescan a bus for new devices is a nice feature but with
the note that some buses cope with new attachments more gracefully
than others - scsi in particular can be a major PITA if you screw up
the bus termination/connections when adding a new device "live".

>HP-UX includes "ioscan" which will find all attached hardware for which
>drivers are in the kernel, whether or not they have device files.
>

find and configure or just find?  If it is just find then you may want
to look at the prtconf tool that I bundled with abc which tells you
what devices the NetBSD kernel knows about.  The prtconf tool is
really just a sub-function of abc.  Both prtconf and abc share the
device detection code, prtconf just prints out what was found whereas
abc does a bit more than that :-)

-- 
Brett Lymn, Computer Systems Administrator, British Aerospace Australia
===============================================================================
  And the monks would cry unto them, "Keep the bloody noise down!"
  - Mort, Terry Pratchett.