Re: (Semi-random) thoughts on device tree structure and devfs

[Eric Haszlakiewicz <erh%nimenees.com@localhost>]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:15:59AM -0500, der Mouse wrote:
> I'm a little confused, here.  How can chmod and chown on /dev/wd0a do
> anything useful if /dev/wd0a just gets redirected to (say)
> /dev/default/wd0a?  Removing access helps in only a few cases, because
> someone wishing to bypass the removal can go directly to
> /dev/default/wd0a.  And granting access doesn't help either, because
> the access will fail on /dev/default/wd0a even if it doesn't on
> /dev/wd0a.

Perhaps it should be a hard link instead then?  Unfortunately, then you
don't have the easy access to the information of what the link points to.


> >> You have to shutdown cleanly, otherwise you lose DB.
> > Sweet jesus.  Talk about brittle solutions...

The "DB" (whether it's an actual database, or a file on a filesystem, or
whatever) shouldn't care about clean shutdown most of the time, only if
you happen to crash in the middle of changing things.  The contents
and permissions of /dev aren't going to be changing much in most normal
operation so it seems like optimizing the "DB" to be in a safe state
most of the time, even if it makes changes slower, would solved this problem.

eric