Thanks to Stephane Bortzmeyer for his pointer to the Sun managers list's
disk format information.
It will probably come as no surprise that maintaining such lists is a big
nuisance, especially as more and more quality SCSI disks enter the market.
In DEC OSF/1 V3.2 (due out soon) most of the need for disktab entries will
go away -- the SCSI CAM subsystem (and in particular disklabel) will look at
the device and determine its geometry and other relevant information from
the vendor supplied data. So, in most cases, you simply won't need to have
a disktab entry for the device. I *think* most of this is functional in the
V3.0 release as well, but I'm not certain. We are working to make even more
improvements in the SCSI CAM subsystem in future releases, with addition of
documentation to make it clear what you can just have work.
So, if you have a new SCSI disk and you don't have the disktab entry, you
can probably get it to work correctly by simply telling disklabel to use a
disk type that isn't listed in disktab, and it will query the device.
Note that you can use the SCU utility (see the scu(8) reference page) to get
information on SCSI devices and display it. (You can use it for a variety
of other tasks, as well, such as formatting a floppy disk or playing a CD in
a CD reader -- as described in the reference page.) In many cases, this is
what you'd need to craft your own disktab entry.
Tom
Dr. Thomas P. Blinn, UNIX Software Group, Digital Equipment Corporation
110 Spit Brook Road, MS ZKO3-2/U20 Nashua, New Hampshire 03062-2698
Technology Partnership Engineering Phone: (603) 881-0646
Internet: tpb_at_zk3.dec.com Digital's Easynet: alpha::tpb
Worry kills more people than work because more people worry than work.
My favorite palindrome is: Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
-- Phil Agre, pagre_at_ucsd.edu
Opinions expressed herein are my own, and do not necessarily represent
those of my employer or anyone else, living or dead, real or imagined.
Received on Thu Jan 05 1995 - 10:10:43 NZDT