Detecting cards in USB card reader

[Mike Clarke]

In an attempt to get round the problem that my Olympus C-2040Z camera 
won't communicate with FreeBSD versions above 6.4 I've installed an 
Akasa AK-ICR-01B internal card reader on my 8.0-RELEASE-p2 system.

The reader is detected when the system boots and device nodes are 
created for da0, da1, da2 and da3. If a card is inserted before booting 
the computer it is detected and the appropriate device node is created 
(e.g. /dev/da0s1) but subsequently inserting a card into a slot which 
was empty fails to create the appropriate device. Playing around with 
camcontrol and restarting devd have no effect either.

After a bit of Googling I found that 'cat /dev/null > /dev/da0' appears 
to be the fix for forcing the creation of /dev/da0s1 after inserting a 
card in the slot associated with da0. Although this gets round the 
problem I can't help feeling uncomfortable about attempting to write to 
raw devices and was wondering if there was any suitable usbconfig or 
HAL incantation which could be used to achieve the desired effect in a 
safer looking way.

-- 
Mike Clarke