Re: You guys should give linux a try

David J Taylor wrote: 
Måns Rullgård wrote:

"David J Taylor"
<david-taylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
writes:


Paul Allen wrote: 

[]

Nonsense.  It's an OS problem.  I've had Windows scramble drive
letters when it sees a new device.  The concept of drive letters
was adequate back when a machine with both A: and B: drives was a
luxury.  When C: and D: became possible, it was time to scrap the
concept and look around to see what other systems were doing.  The
Unix concept of mounting a filesystem had been around for a long
time at that point.  Microsoft, as the vendor of Xenix, was surely
aware of it.  But, no.  We still are afflicted with a 20-year-old
bad design. <sigh> Paul Allen


More likely it's actually a poorly written driver, supplied by the
vendor not by Microsoft.


I plugged the card reader into a USB port, and windows used whatever
driver was already installed.  I did not go anywhere near the machine
with any driver CD or so.


As to drive letters, whilst those are still available for backwards
compatibility, UNC names (\\server\share\...) have been around for
ages, and mount points are available with some of the newer versions
of Windows.


Lots of programs require drive letters, or a major pain to use with
UNC names.  Mapping to drive letters seems to be faster, too.


With Linux I have found it a complete pain that floppies have to be
mounted explicitly, and are not just available by default.

Others have already pointed you at autofs.


Well, I'm sorry to hear you had the problem, but I've not seen it here. There /is/ an issue with disk drive letters being force by the BIOS, but that's the PC hardware spec and not the OS, as I understand it. 

Well, no, the BIOS doesn't know anything about drive letters.  It knows
about devices, and operating systems like MS-DOS and Windows represent
those devices as letters.  Recent versions of Windows may be more
enlightened.  I don't know, and don't particularly care.

Which programs have not been updated to handle UNC names? Do you have any speed measurements to support your claim? 

I guess this is getting rather far from the problem of drive letters
getting scrambled.

Thanks to the pointers to autofs, but when I saw that several pages of instructions were required simply to see a floppy disk, my reaction was "why is it that complex?". 

The short answer is, "because it's not that complex."

The longer answer is that real operating systems can do more things
with a floppy than just put a FAT filesystem on it, and you don't
always want the system to waste time trying to mount the floppy.

I prefer to mount and unmount removable media manually via the menu
pick on my RedHat 9 desktop.  if I recall correctly, Mandrake used
to have a "disks" entry in the root menu that let you mount/unmount
things.  The autofs autoomounter can work nicely, but it has the
characteristic that mount points are not visible in the filesystem
until you actually traverse the mount point and cause the filesystem
to be mounted.  So, the graphical file managers preferred by the
Windows-centric have to be tricked into triggering the mounting of a
floppy or CD.

If you want to try autofs, here's how it works:

You probably already have autofs installed.  If you don't, just find
the autofs package on your install CD's or look up a version for
Mandrake on rpmfind.net and install it.  A quick peek showed some
versions for Mandrake "cooker".

Then, put this in /etc/auto.master:

	/misc   /etc/auto.misc  --timeout=60

and this in /etc/auto.misc:

	floppy          -fstype=auto            :/dev/fd0
	cdrom		-fstype=auto		:/dev/cdrom
	camera		-fstype=auto		:/dev/sda0

(The camera entry assumes a USB device that looks like a filesystem
on a SCSI drive.  Card readers and some cameras work this way.)

Now, enable and start the autofs service:

	/sbin/chkconfig autofs on
	/sbin/service autofs start

Put a floppy with a filesystem in the drive and say "cd /misc/floppy".
The drive will buzz for a second or two and then you'll be able to
see the contents of the floppy.

You can use the more usual /mnt/floppy and /mnt/cdrom mount
points by changing "/misc" to "/mnt" in /etc/auto.master.

See?  It's simple.  Not really necessary, but simple nonetheless.

Paul Allen
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Locking Down a Linux Box
    ... > routers/firewalls on a floppy. ... changes -- there would be no mount or modprobe program left by the ... > administration on this host anymore, but an attacker could ... > then leave the filesystem readonly. ...
    (Focus-Linux)
  • Re: Locking Down a Linux Box
    ... Mine will be a firewall, ... There are several linux routers/firewalls on a floppy. ... It currently doesn't use (mount) any hard drive ... > The permissions on the filesystem are stripped to bare minimums, ...
    (Focus-Linux)
  • Re: Card Reader
    ... on the mount of a fat32 filesystem, but native Unix filesystems do a little interlocking-inodes dance during a mount, and the filesystem can only be unmounted if the media is present so the dance can be reversed. ... any write activity has been seen on the hardware, pulling the card out won't harm anything at all. ... When the floppy activity has stopped, pull the disk from the drive. ...
    (rec.photo.digital)
  • Re: missing /usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1 ... not found
    ... No need to mount any sort of filesystem. ... intention is that you use a different floppy than the ones you use to ... writing direct to a block device like this will destroy ...
    (freebsd-questions)
  • Re: Mounting MSDOS floppy drive
    ... > However, if I remove that floppy and insert another, I can't refresh ... means a different filesystem, so you have to unmount the first, switch ... disks, and mount the second. ... For MSDOS format disks, you can use the mtools package for quick ...
    (alt.os.linux.redhat)