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

[Lonni J Friedman]

On 8/16/07, Bill Campbell <linux-sxs at celestial.com> wrote:
> 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.

RHEL4 has a bunch of libraw1394 packages which claim to provide direct
access to the IEEE-1394 bus through the Linux 1394 subsystem's raw1394
user space interface.  I've never used it, so I can't comment on how
well it works, but I'd be shocked if RHEL4 had zero 1394 support.

>
> 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.

gnome-volume-manager is just a GUI front end.  I've never used it for
anything, but I can assure you that I've hotswapped SCSI & SATA drives
quite often without any problems.  Ditto for USB storage devices.

Is something not working for you, or are you just trying to learn in
advance about internals?

>
> 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.

Sorry, can't help there.

>
> >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.

oh well

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand                       http://netllama.linux-sxs.org