Solaris 2.2 introduced a new scheme for automatically mounting removable media. It consists of a program "vold" (volume daemon) which sits around watching for insertions of floppies and CD's, handles ejects, talks to the file manager, and invokes a second program called "rmmount" (removable media mounter) to mount the disk.
Note that on most SPARCstations, you must run "volcheck" whenever you insert a floppy, as the floppy hardware doesn't tell SunOS that a floppy was inserted and polling the drive would wear it out pretty quickly.
Advantages of this scheme:
- no longer need root; users can mount and unmount at will. - can do neat tricks like automagically start "workman" or other Audio CD player when audio CD inserted. - extensible - developers can write their own actions.
Drawbacks:
- can no longer access /dev/rfd0 to get at floppy; must use longer name like /vol/dev/rdsk/floppy0 - similarly, CD's get mounted on /cdrom/VOLNAME/SLICE, e.g., /cdrom/solaris_2_2/s0 is slice 0 of the Solaris 2 CD (nice that it does mount all the partitions, though!).
To read or write a non-filesystem floppy (tar, cpio, etc), put in the diskette and run "volcheck" from the commandline or click "Check for Floppy" in the filemgr to get it noticed; then access /vol/dev/rfd0/unlabeled (e.g. "tar tvf /vol/dev/rfd0/unlabeled").
[Solaris 2.3 and later: /vol/dev/rdiskette0/unlabeled, or /vol/dev/aliases/floppy0.]
If you want the old behavior, remove the /etc/rc2.d/S*volmgt link, and reboot.