Useful hints for dvdisaster
===========================

Device access
-------------
dvdisaster tries to read `/dev/pass*` to list available optical drives,
so it will not detect any available drives if the user running
dvdisaster does not have permissions to read `/dev/pass*`.

The solution is to create the file `/etc/devfs.rules`, containing
something like the following.

	[localrules=10]
	add path 'pass*' mode 0775 group mygroup

You also need to add this line to `/etc/rc.conf`:

	devfs_system_ruleset="localrules"

You can use anything you like for `localrules`, and the number does not have to be `10`.
See `devfs.rules(5)` for more details.

If `/etc/devfs.rules` already exists, add the line starting `add` to the section for the ruleset
mentioned in `/etc/rc.conf`.

For this to take effect, either reboot, or issue the command:

	# service devfs restart

as root.

Missing optical drives
----------------------

The most common problem encountered is that dvdisaster does not detect 
optical drives on older versions of FreeBSD.

FreeBSD 9.x does not pre-install a uniform CD-ROM driver for SCSI and
ATAPI drives, thus it cannot use any ATAPI drives in an out-of-the-box
FreeBSD 9.x installation. Normally, this can be fixed by loading a
kernel module called `atapicam`.

### Loading the `atapicam` kernel module by hand

To manually load the required kernel module, issue the command:

	# kldload atapicam

To see if any optical drives are  available:

	# camcontrol devlist
	<NAME OF YOUR DRIVE>           at scbus1 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,cd0)

### Loading the `atapicam` kernel module permanently

If the above step works, the module can be loaded automatically at boot time by adding
the line:

	atapicam_load="YES"

to the file `/boot/loader.conf`.

### Building the `atapicam` module

If the atapicam kernel module is not available (check the contents
of /boot/kernel) you will need to recompile the kernel with the following
additional device line in the kernel configuration:

	device atapicam

This will actually build the module into the kernel. To build it separately,
see `make.conf(5)`.

The devices `ata`, `scbus`, `cd`, and `pass` are also required, but are included by
default in FreeBSD 6.0 and later.