I've encountered some weird problems in my attempts to install a USB scanner (Epson Perfection 1260) in my RH8 system. The problems culminated in my CDROMs disappearing from the system whenever any USB device (printer, scanner etc) is disconnected.
After installing the scanner I updated XSANE to the latest version (0.9.0) to get the updated necessary driver (plustek). I then found that sane-find-scanner and scanimage -L would only see the scanner when running from root. XSANE would also only run from root (accompanied by numerous warnings about the folly of running it from root). I then attempted to find where the scanner was in the /dev directory, so I could change the necessary permissions. Unfortunately, it did not appear to be anywhere in /dev, with sane-find-scanner only finding it in the /proc directory. I temporarily solved the problem by changing the permissions of the appropriate /proc entry. This had the disadvantage that I had to repeat the process whenever I rebooted or switched off the scanner. Following some instructions in "Linux Format" magazine I attempted to create a device node for the scanner using "mknod /dev/usbscanner c180 48". I also edited the plustek.conf file so it could find it (device /dev/usbscanner). I soon found that this resulted in the scanner disappearing altogether and could only restore it by changing the plustek.conf entry to "device auto".
At this point my CDROM troubles started. I have a DVD reader and a CDR/W, both IDE devices installed with ide-scsi. These kept vanishing from the system, and I found that this happened whenever any USB device was switched off or unplugged. Their nodes in /dev vanished (/dev/cdrom and /dev/cdrom1), together with the corresponding /mnt entries. Also, /etc/fstab was altered to remove them and a new file fstab.REVOKE was created, containing the cdrom entries. This happened even if fstab was set to read-only (chmod 444), so whatever process was doing it clearly had root privilages.
Presumably the system has somehow got confused and is treating the CDROMs like USB devices, but I really don't know how to proceed from here. Sorry about the length of this email, but does anyone have any idea what's going on and how to fix it?
Regards
Clive Harris
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