In <00062007162703.00490@ghanima> Oliver Neukum (Oliver.Neukum@lrz.uni-muenchen.de) wrote:
> Am Die, 20 Jun 2000 schrieben Sie:
>> Scott Lenser <slenser@cs.cmu.edu> said:
>> Use automount. Trick to do so has been documented for ages.
> Trick is a little weak. Kludge actually.
The ONLY way to deal with unsolvable problem (and yes, handling good old
3" & 5" floppy without mount/unmount is UNSOLVABLE problem) is to use kludges.
Sometimes they work, sometimes not - it depends from your luck.
>> > 3) make sure that the floppy drive busy light is on when their are dirty
>> > buffers for the floppy (may not be possible on all/any hardware)
>>
>> Wears out the disk, perhaps damages heads of the drive. To do this probably
>> also implies a gross violation of layering within the kernel.
> Why ? You lock drive doors, too. Have the floppy driver interpret
> locking door as keeping light on.
Hmm. Yes, for modern drives it can be solution (even if painfull: what if
someone stepped on floppy, inserted by you and just opened file for viewing
with mcview?).
>> > 4) make sure that all dirty data is written back whenever the device
>> > would otherwise become not busy (this should keep the floppy drive light
>> > on, may not be appropriate for other kinds of removable media)
>>
>> This probably implies a gross violation of layering within the kernel.
> No more than O_SYNC does. And it won't help you on filesystems that
> maintain a flag in the superblock.
>> Just use the graphical tools your desktop gives you, or use mtools.
> No good. Users will use the icons to mount, but simply pull the
> floppy when they are done.
Users are not THAT stupid :-) Usually just two or three completely trashed
floppies enough to teach tupical user to use unmount icon. Plus it's problem
only for old floppies: you just can not pull mounted ZIP drive or MO drive :-)
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jun 23 2000 - 21:00:19 EST