Hi, I'm on old SCO UNIX admin now surrounded by LINUX...

cabalguy · 04-23-2008, 02:39 PM

I have been in IT for over twenty years now and have rolled out most of the popular O/S's. I used to support SCO servers and more recently my support team is taking on a lot of LINUX builds on servers and workstations (Red Hat/Ubuntu/CentOS). I need a refresh on the training as most of my SCO experience was pre-Gui X/Windows.

To open things up we are trying to troubleshoot a remote RHL install. We are trying to upgrade a Telco vendors MIS package and it keeps claiming the CD-ROM device is not a block device:

"/mnt/cdrom is not a block device".

The CD was mounted....we can log on as root and browse the files. The vendor's scripts use a different login id and it defaults to the CDROM to check for upgrade files.

Thanks

Chris

forrestt · 04-23-2008, 02:50 PM

Welcome to LQ.

/mnt/cdrom isn't a block device, so that is true. It is the directory where the cdrom gets mounted. The block device will be in the /dev directory. If it is mounted,

Code:

mount | grep cdrom | awk '{print $1}'

should give you the block device name.

HTH

Forrest

cabalguy · 04-25-2008, 12:31 PM

Thanks for the reply. The device mounts successfully and it is "/dev/cdrom" which is being mapped to the directory /mnt/cdrom. When I run the admin script to upgrade the software it asks to ensure the CD-ROM is ready..I hit enter and I get the meaningless error "not a block device" and it asks me to try again.

The light on the drive is not coming on but is this a problem where the script for the upgrade is not finding the CD-ROM (bad parameter perhaps)? Does the kernal need to be relinked? The fstab looks good and is comparable to the other servers where the upgrade ran OK.

The only differnece here was the addtion of support for a USB-serial cable to support a serial modem.

Thanks