At Fri, 7 Feb 2003 17:04:06 +0000 (UTC), "Ben Harris" wrote:
> In particular, remember that in a
> diskless environment, MAKEDEV usually gets run on the NFS server, which may
> well not be running NetBSD, and even if it is running NetBSD is likely to be
> a different architecture and version from the system whose /dev is being
> populated.  MAKEDEV isn't as portable as it could be, but making it even
> less portable would be a bad idea IMO.

Of course, if running MAKEDEV on a server -- which, btw, IMO is
actually fairly useful -- you still need to be careful of a few
things:

* you need to make sure your UIDs and GIDs are the same as they would
  be on the client, and

* you need to make sure the server's device node format is the same.
  There are a lot of divergences in this area.

For the latter, to be safe, you really need a client-OS-dependent tool
to create the nodes to begin with (or you need to have a 'mknod' that
accepts a hex number and uses it blindly, and you need to then create
that number in the MAKEDEV script).



chris