The following drive, evidently a rebranded Artec VOM-12E48X -- it's 
packaged as a Mad Dog Multimedia 12X DVD+R+RW -- has no vendor id!

  # grep ^cd1 /var/run/dmesg.boot
  cd1 at atapibus1 drive 0: <VOM-12E48X, , VER-100> cdrom removable
  cd1: 32-bit data port
  cd1: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 2 (Ultra/33)
  cd1(piixide0:1:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 2 (Ultra/33) (using DMA data transfers)
  # scsictl /dev/rcd1d identify
  /dev/rcd1d: scsibus1 target 0 lun 0 <, VOM-12E48X, 1008>

It's more than just window dressing. With "cdrdao", for instance, you 
may not make entries in the driver settings table with missing fields.

One possibility that suggests itself is to modify scsipi_strvis() to 
return "UNKNOWN" rather than an empty string in cases like this. Any 
better ideas?


Frederick