Using devfs.conf as a porting aide

I've recently been given the task of moving some software from FreeBSD 4.x to FreeBSD 6.x on a consulting basis. This move was very simple and easy, except for one area: serial device names.

In the great tty-rewrite to make it MP safe that was done, there were a number of name changes that were unavoidable when making the tty layer more uniform between drivers. Unfortunately, sio was one of the drivers that had its names changed. This company used many multi-port expansion cards, so finding all the places where /dev/cuaaX was hard coded was difficult.

To validate the rest of the software, I created the following /etc/devfs.conf file to allow the old names to work while I hunted down all the places they were used.

# 4.x compat names on 6.x
link cuad0 cuaa0
link cuad0.init cuaia0
link cuad0.lock cuala0
link ttyd0.init ttyid0
link ttyd0.lock ttyld0

These blocks were repeated for each of the serial devices in the system (I wrote a quick script to generate them for all 12 devices). One thing to remember is that the 11th device is named "/dev/cuada" not "/dev/cuad10", so you need to print the unit number as hex.

You could easily extend this to FreeBSD 7 the names changed again when FreeBSD moved from sio to uart.

# 6.x names on 7.x system
link cuau0 cuad0
link cuau0.init cuad0.init
link cuau0.lock cuad0.lock
link ttyu0 ttyd0
link ttyu0.init ttyd0.init
link ttyu0.lock ttyd0.lock

again, it is a simple matter to look over the unit numbers necessary.

Note, this will only work for devices that are statically created at boot time. If you have a number of usb serial devices on a newer FreeBSD system that are replacing an older sio based FreeBSD 4.x system, you may need to use devfs.rules to accomplish this transition, which is beyond the scope of this article.

New FreeNAS alpha

After a few unforeseen delays, we have a new FreeNAS snapshot available over at source forge. As an experiment, we are distributing these snapshots using xz as well as bzip2 compressed images. It makes a big difference.

What's new?

First and foremost, we have a completely new GUI look and feel. We've imported dojango into the GUI to take advantage of Dojo JavaScript Toolkit. The flow of the interface is much nicer, it looks better, and we've added additional help to make it easier to use. We think you'll like this new GUI. We've made dozens of improvements over the past few weeks to the GUI. We hope you like the new location for enabling shares.

We've also added support for Apple's AFP protocol to the new GUI. You can now use the GUI to export CIFS, AFP and NFS shares (which we'll be calling Windows, Apple and Unix shares in the GUI). We've added back-end support for FTP as well. The major protocols are now all supported, although some media options are still unimplemented.

This image has a universal booting feature. The first image was difficult to use on some VM systems since they were exclusively SCSI disks (appearing as da0, rather than the ad0 that was hard-coded into the fstab). We've added support for using UFS filesystem labels to nanobsd, so we're now able to produce an image that you can put on any kind of disk that FreeBSD supports and have it boot, since it finds the partitions for /, etc by looking for a label on the filesystem rather than insisting on ad0s1a.

At the present time, we support only adding NEW volumes to the system. If you add a volume to the system, we will always initialize it. This means that you shouldn't (yet) attach old volumes to FreeNAS 8. We will try to correct this problem for the forthcoming FreeNAS 8 beta. While we've made every effort to make things reliable, we've not put this software through a complete QA cycle, so it should be used for testing purposes only.