Johnny Billquist drunkenly mumbled...
> 
> > Currently the disk subsystem doesn't work that way. MSCP disks are numbered 
> > sequentially from 0 in the order in which they are probed.
> 
> That depends! If you say ra*, then it's so, but you can just as well say
> 
> ra0 at mscpbus0 drive0
> 
> and then it won't move around, I promise. :-)

but why is the default behaivor to be dynamic?  i wasn't able to build a new
kernel on my NetBSD/sparc machine until i got new disks in it. and standard
old sun SCSI sets ID3 to be the first disk and ID1 to be the second disk (this
is weird, i know, but it's how it works) so by adding a second disk my root
partition moved from /dev/sd0a to /dev/sd1a and my system wouldn't boot very
well.  luckily i've been an admin for 10 years, so it was very easy to fix, but
why would we even WANT to dynamically assign device names to something like
disks that have static mappings later on (ala /etc/fstab)

disk should be: /dev/sd[SCSI-ID]a so that i would have had /dev/sd3a in my
/etc/fstab and after adding a disk that wouldn't have changed.  the same
should go for all disk interfaces, not just SCSI.  my DSSI disk with ID 2 
should have the number 2 somehere in it's device name.  that's how *I* and any
other reasonable person would want it to work.

i love BSD, but this one tiny thing really annoys me.

the current discussion has no impact on this opinion, i don't really care how 
you guys implement it (Sun was right Chuck, i /don't/ care) just make it behave
in a sensible manner.  i've been trying to keep my mouth shut about the device 
naming ever since i brought it up with the FreeBSD crew once many years ago and 
almost got lynched for being a heretic.  well, there are obviously enough 
heretics on this list that maybe nobody will try to kill me this time. :)

cheers,

-brian

ps: just my dollar fifty.