Troubleshooting: Solaris {vold} refuses to mount & ejects CD/DVD

Problem:

While Volume Management Daemon (vold) is running, Solaris rejects all CD/DVD media and ejects 'em as soon as they were inserted in the CD/DVD drive. However manual mounting of the same media works, with no issues.

Solution:

vold needs the removable media device server smserver, to be running in order to manage the removable media devices. So, make sure smserver is enabled, and on-line.

# svcs -l smserver
fmri         svc:/network/rpc/smserver:default
name         removable media management
enabled      false
state        disabled
next_state   none
state_time   Thu Sep 29 20:25:19 2005
restarter    svc:/network/inetd:default
contract_id  
dependency   require_all/restart svc:/network/rpc/bind (online)

smserver is not running, and the following lines from truss output confirms that client (vold) is not able to communicate with the smserver.

/9:     open("/var/run/smedia_svc", O_RDONLY)           = 35
/9:     door_call(35, 0xD244DCA0)                       Err#9 EBADF
/9:     close(35)                                       = 0

The above series of calls can be easily mapped to the Solaris source code hosted at OpenSolaris web site, starting from call to smedia_get_handle in medium.c, and then tracing the calls further {in source code}.

Comments in smediad.c source file helps understanding the implementation a bit.

So to resolve this issue, simply bring smserver online. Let's continue with the above example.

# svcadm -v enable smserver
svc:/network/rpc/smserver:default enabled.

# svcs -p smserver
STATE          STIME    FMRI
online         21:17:43 svc:/network/rpc/smserver:default

Now vold is able to communicate with smserver and did its job of mounting the removable media (CD).

Excerpt from truss output:

/10:    open("/var/run/smedia_svc", O_RDONLY)           = 36
/10:    door_call(36, 0xD244DDB8)                       = 0
/10:    close(36)                                       = 0

Here's the df output:

# df -h | grep cdrom
/vol/dev/dsk/c1t0d0/wgr614v5   239M   239M     0K   100%    /cdrom/wgr614v5

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