[Wellington-pm] Hardware and Perl

Lesley Longhurst lrw at clear.net.nz
Wed Jun 13 19:32:52 PDT 2012


On 14/06/12 14:08, Grant McLean wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-06-14 at 11:03 +1200, Lesley Longhurst wrote:
>> Hi Mongers,
>>
>> Does anyone know a good* module for getting information about the
>> capabilities of CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drives? The methods we've been using to
>> date are not working too well with the transition to virtualisation.
> I'm afraid I don't know of such a thing.

Oh well, it was worth a crack.  I was kind of hoping for one of those 
"aha" moments like the time I was told about Data::Dumper ... but I know 
I was being optimistic. Never mind.  :-)

> If I were looking to get that information I'd probably start by parsing
> the output of lshw.  But that might be what you're doind already - you
> didn't say.
Various things along those lines. /proc/sys/dev/cdrom/info is the first 
port of call, supplemented with info found under /sys/block/foo. This 
approach has served well enough until now but /proc/sys/dev/cdrom/info 
is not being correctly populated under VMware. It shows that the device 
exists but doesn't get the capabilities. I think perhaps we're missing a 
driver.

> We had a brief chat on the #wellington.pm channel on irc.perl.org and
> the only other suggestion that came up was perhaps your problems are due
> to running inside a VM where you can't get access to the information
> (once again, wild speculation in the face of little information).
Thanks to everyone for trying. Perhaps I should hop on that channel myself.

> If you do find an awesome solution then by all means tell us :-)
I don't think "awesome" is the right word, but in addition to the above 
we use the output "cdrec dev=foo -prcap", and I've recently discovered 
dvd+rw-mediainfo which reports on media in the drive.

-- 
Lesley Walker Longhurst
Linux Systems Administrator
Opus International Consultants Ltd



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