SUMMARY: Application of Solaris 8 patch 112438-01 without reboot

Thanks to Casper Dik, Michael Sullivan, Buddy Lumpkin, David Foster and
Christopher L. Barnard for their responses.

Original question:

> Now that Sun has finally seen the light and given us /dev/[u]random for
> Solaris 8 in the form of patch 112438-01, I note that the patch
> instructions take the MSish easy way out and require a reboot, as if the
> average admin doesn't load and unload kernel modules, make nodes, etc. on
> a daily basis.
> 
> For the record, what is the correct process for enabling the new random
> device on a running Solaris 8 box?
> 
> In what way is the following incorrect and/or insufficient?
> 
> # patchadd 112438-01
> # mknod /devices/pseudo/random@0:random c 82 0
> # mknod /devices/pseudo/random@0:urandom c 82 1
> # chgrp sys /devices/pseudo/random*
> # cd /dev
> # ln -s ../devices/pseudo/random@0:random /dev/random
> # ln -s ../devices/pseudo/random@0:urandom /dev/urandom
> # modload /kernel/drv/random

The steps I used to obtain a working /dev/[u]random without the
unnecessary reboot remained the same and continued to work after a reboot
(not a reconfig), thus satisfying the `sufficient' though not necessarily
the `correct' condition.

It should not be necessary to manually create the device files (mknod, ln,
etc.), however testing on a new clean and up-to-date Solaris 8 system with
the patch applied, none of "devfsadm -i random", "devfsadm", "drvconfig"
or "add_drv random" create the device files, only loaded the module.

I hope that with further testing an/or information, a more suitable
solution can be found.


-Andrew-
-- 
 ________________________________________________________________
|  -Andrew J. Caines-   703-886-2689    Andrew.J.Caines@wcom.com |
| Unix Systems Engineer, WorldCom  Andrew.J.Caines+page@wcom.com |
_______________________________________________
sunmanagers mailing list
sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers