modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-## and NTP issues

[Derek Martin]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 04:33:23PM -0400, Derek Doucette wrote:
> Michael ODonnell said:
> >
> >
> > It's possible that you have something periodically
> > searching for some IDE device (like a disk or cdrom)
> does anyone know of a way to find such a device? like I said I checked
> crontab.

It could be any program that you're running on your system.  For
example, magicdev is a program which tries to identify if a CD has
been inserted into your CD-ROM drive.  If you run GNOME, then I
believe magicdev runs by default, and is configured to check for
/dev/hdc by default.  If you had no IDE devices, this would result in
at least the major-22 message showing up, since that corresponds to
hdc:

  $ ls -l /dev |grep ' 22,'
  brw-rw----    1 root     disk      22,   0 Jan 30  2003 hdc
  brw-rw----    1 root     disk      22,   1 Jan 30  2003 hdc1
  brw-rw----    1 root     disk      22,  10 Jan 30  2003 hdc10

But magicdev is almost certainly not the only program which does this,
and tracking down which program is doing it will probably be
difficult.  And not worth the effort.

> > and referring to it as /dev/hd-something-or-other
> > and your system doesn't have IDE devices so you
> > have none of the corresponding drivers available
> > (either statically linked or as modules) so modprobe
> > is unhappy...
> That makes sense, does a major block number correspond to a particular
> type of device

Yes.

> Does this also mean that it is safe to put the alias device block
> entry into /etc/modules.conf?

Yes.  If you're seeing these messages, but all of the devices you DO
have are working properly, then there's no harm done by adding an
alias ___ off statement to modules.conf.  This statement just tells
modprobe not to try to load modules for this device.  For more
details, see the manpage for modules.conf -- this is explained in
there.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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