[Linux-users] Documentation on hotplugging/gnome-volume-manager

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Aug 16, 2007, Lonni J Friedman wrote:
>On 8/16/07, Bill Campbell <linux-sxs at celestial.com> wrote:
>> Does anybody have any pointers to good documentation on hotplug
>> devices on CentOS 4.5 or similar systems?  The things I've found
>> in Google searches tend to be how-tos on basic installation, but
>> nothing on how things actually work, or how to configure it.
>>
>> I've been surprised several times as I get into CentOS after
>> using SuSE for years with things such as limited file system
>> support (no xfs), no firewire support, and hot swapping that
>> only seems to work by default when one has a GUI session open.
>
>While its true that RHEL4 (which Centos is based off of) has no XFS
>filesystem support,  I'm pretty sure that it has firewire support. I'm
>not really clear on what you mean by hot swapping. Are you referring
>to storage devices?  If so, that is determined by the driver, and most
>definitely works for SCSI devices.

I haven't found kernel modules in CentOS 4.5 for ieee1394, and I really
don't want to be building custom kernels any more than I want to drive
ancient British cars that came with cranks and often needed them.

I'm referring primarily to storage devices, external hard drives primarily.

If I understand it correctly, automatic recognition of hot pluggable
devices depends on the gnome-volume-manager which normally is started when
a user logs into a GUI session.  The vast majority of the Linux systems we
use and support are running in init state 3 with nobody logged in on the
console, all support being done via ssh.

I'm really looking for documentation on how this works, and haven't been
able to find anything useful on the Red Hat or CentOS sites, nor in the
dead-tree books I have.

>Also note that RHEL5 has alot better overall hardware support than
>RHEL4 (which is based largely off of what existed when a 2.6.9 kernel
>was relatively new).

I know that the later version has better hardware support, but there are
issues with some software, in particular Zimbra, which doesn't work on
RHEL5/CentOS5 which is the major reason for using it.

Bill
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