Hard drive device names... Serial Numbers?

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

Firstly, I want to apologize to Jeremy Chadwick, and also to anyone
else who, either recently or in the past, has been kind enough to
try contact me (to send me something non-spamish) and who has been
tripped up by my ham-fisted local spam filtering.  Believe me, it
isn't personal, and I regret that you had trouble reaching me.

I could go on at great length about my personal philosophy regarding
spam, and spam filtering, but this is neither the time nor the place.
Still, I feel compelled to say just a few words on this topic now.

For now I'll just briefly say that unlike 99.999% of all Internet
users, I personally have never come around to the belief that the
existance of spam is inevitable.  Rather, I believe that 100% of it
is due to either incompetence or greed on the part of the folks
responsible for overseeing the machines at the IP addresses from
which it emanates, with incompetence being responsible for the majority
of it.  In the case of spam coming out of the likes of Comcast and
other "public access" Internet Service Providers that are neither
knowingly or willingly supporting spam however, I am of the belief...
not widely shared... that they could put a stop to virtually 100% of
the spam coming out of their networks simply by requiring all local
senders to authenticate and by limiting per-day outbound mail flow
on a per-account basis to something modest (e.g. 100 messages) except
in special cases (and by special request on the part of the user in
question).  But very few ISPs do this, because they are, by and large,
too cheap/greedy to be willing to spend the money to implement and support
any such simple and effective system for curtailing their own outbound
spam flow.  Comcast is no exception to this general rule.  As a result,
I have previously locally blocked all Comcast sub-domains that have 
spammed me in the past, specifically:

mn.comcast.net
ny.comcast.net
in.comcast.net
fl.comcast.net
ma.comcast.net
co.comcast.net
de.comcast.net
ga.comcast.net
va.comcast.net
mi.comcast.net
tx.comcast.net
wa.comcast.net
ut.comcast.net
pa.comcast.net
nj.comcast.net
md.comcast.net
sc.comcast.net
ms.comcast.net
or.comcast.net
tn.comcast.net
al.comcast.net
ct.comcast.net
la.comcast.net
dc.comcast.net
ar.comcast.net
nh.comcast.net
ks.comcast.net
wv.comcast.net
nm.comcast.net
vt.comcast.net

But I had made a special exception for ca.comcast.net, because I needed
to do so in order to be able to receive e-mail from one California-resident
relative.  Unfortunately, it appears that Comcast recently snafued my
special California exception by changing their DNS naming scheme so that
now, mail coming out of their California mail servers arrives from nodes
within the ca.mail.comcast.net subdomain, rather than nodes within the
mail.ca.comcast.net domain, as previously.  Predictably, and shortly
thereafter, I got spammed from a node within the ca.mail.comcast.net
subdomain, thus causing that domain to end up in the local blacklist.
(And that in turn caused e-mail from both Jeremy and my California
relative to start bouncing.)

I thank Jeremy for his ernest offer to put me in touch with "people on
the Comcast side" and I do accept that offer, but I feel sure that despite
any amount of haranguing and/or cajoling I might subject any such contacts
to, Comcast corporate, like so many other ISPs, has long ago made the
irrevocable decision NOT to do what it takes to stop their network from
leaking massive amounts of spam on a daily basis, because to do otherwise
might subtract some paltry number of bucks from the corporate bottom line.

	"Our problems are manmade, therefore, they can be solved by man."
			-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

My apologies to all for the lengthy off-topic digression.  Jeremy, I've
readjusted my local blacklists now, so you should be able to e-mail me
direct.

Back on topic...

I've tried to plow through the references Jeremy gave regading the "wired
down" capability of CAM(4).  I think that I may sort-of understand it.
It does appear to be _a_ solution.  I'm not yet 100% persuaded that it
is the _best_ solution, and the idea of using serial numbers (or WWN
numbers) is still appealing, at least to me.  But I'm not going to
advocate for that, mostly because I don't feel that I fully understand
this "wired down" stuff yet.  I need to look into that more before I
say anything else.

At least I come away with the the satisfaction of knowing that (a) I am
indeed not the first person to have either thought of or suggested using
drive serial numbers and also (b) that this idea _has_ already been well
and truly discussed, apparently by and among better minds than mine.


Regards,
rfg


P.S.  I confess that I've only skimmed the material on the "wired down"
capability of CAM(4).  Perhaps the answer to this question is burried in
there someplace, but I'd just like to ask: What are the rules, if any
regarding what I can rename a given controller channel to within the
/boot/loader.conf file?  Could I rename one to, for example /dev/foobar707
if I wanted to?  If not, then what are the rules?