Adding disk firmware programming capability to camcontrol

[Garrett Cooper]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 4:37 PM, Pegasus Mc Cleaft <ken at mthelicon.com> wrote:
>>> The linux hdparm program is so paranoid about this that you have to use
>>> extra arguments like "--yes-really-destroy-my-disk-drive" to do this.
>>
>>I concur. Loudly.  The ability to brick your hardware is just too
>>large to not make people go through the "I tell you three times"
>>dance.  It's not like people will do this often enough that the
>>pain will be fatal.  And if it is, they ought to be bright enough to
>>know how to automate the process.
>>
>>--lyndon
>
> Hi Lyndon and group,
>
>        I tend to disagree that there should be such argument antics
> employed to protect an operation such as this. Being root should be the only
> protection needed (of course, that's only my opinion). I don’t want to have
> to look up in a man page what magic token I need to add to prove to the
> utility that I understand the consequences of what I am about to do. I
> personally wouldn't mind a simple "Are you sure?" if the magic token is not
> added on the command line, however.
>
>        To me, the only difference between borking a drive because of bad
> firmware and typing "rm -rf *" from root is about £40.  You still lose at
> least a day rebuilding/restoring everything.

    Unfortunately not backs up their systems on a regular basis.
    Having an interactive prompt with a loud warning like many vendor
tools provide today with a non-interactive override option is
sufficient.
    That being said, camcontrol doesn't understand the concept of
interactive vs non-interactive use, so it seems like its design would
need to be redone if you go this route.
Thanks,
-Garrett