According to Greg A. Woods:
>
>Perhaps you're not thinking of *real* machines.  Certainly with PCs you
>are likely to be correct, but with all *real* machines that I've ever
>dealt with you can easily find "c2".

Not sure what you mean by a "real" machine here ;-).  I would defy you
to pick c2 on a Sun after a few adds & removes of hardware with doing
a "boot -r" in between.

>
>Seriously though, maybe a pure cNtNdN scheme isn't good enough for
>NetBSD.  Maybe it's better to stick to driver prefixes, but be more
>explicit about it -- i.e. don't lump all SCSI controllers into sd and
>st, and so on, but actually use espNtNlN and so on.
>

How is this a benefit (seriously)?  How does this make our lives
better?  (FWIW if you have not already guessed, yes I do use Sol2 at
work so I am familiar with the cNtNdNsN naming).

At the moment I have not seen any compelling reasons for either naming
scheme.  They both have flaws but considering where we are at the
moment I cannot see any very good reason for changes (Looking for
reasons here not flamage :-)

>.  Surely you can tell the
>difference between your NCR card and your Adaptec card, no? 

Ummm, seriously, no.  Not without opening the machine up and looking
at them.  From the back panel they both look like 50 pin mini-honda
connectors.  There are no distinguishing features on them from the
back - the cards do, admittedly, look different inside but I am not
often moved to open my machine up and look at the guts of it...

>
>I'm going to try and encourage NetBSD to look slightly beyond the OS R&D
>venue it currently harbours in and take some heed of the requirments of
>real-world 
>

OK, what in the real-world wants /dev/dsk/c3t10d0s2 instead of
/dev/sd99c?  This stuff is hidden in the mount table.  What
requirements do you have that are met by changing the device naming
scheme?

>Even if I mention in passing that I once ran a bunch of SysV machines
>people in the BSD camps will get all jumpy and introspective.  If
>instead I actually come out and claim I prefer Research Unix BSDers get
>all glassy eyed and most have no idea at all what I'm talking about.
>

I do run a bunch of SysV machines and must admit that I am not overly
passionate about the way things are named.  Having sysv style init/run
levels does make sense on machines like database servers et al that
want to shutdown processes gracefully.  The downside being that on a
SysV machine the shutdown may never happen due to the kill scripts
hanging around.

>However I must ask the obvious question:  what OS are you talking about
>here?  HP-UX?  If so, what's the upgrade history of that machine?  I've
>heard that HP-UX does stupid things to try and preserve ancient mappings
>after new hardware is added.  Nobody I know has *ever* put HP-UX up on a
>pedestal of good OS design, let alone me.
>

HP are not the only ones.  Sun does the same, I believe.  You are more
or less forced to do this otherwise you have your drives dancing about
all over the place - which is where we came in isn't it? ;-)

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