BTCFLASH(1L)

✨ NAME ✨

okay so bestie, meet btcflash(1L) — it's the firmware flash utility for the BTC DRW1008 DVD+/-RW recorder. This page lives under Schily´s USER COMMANDS, and yes we're gonna get through all of it together. 💖

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

btcflash dev=device [ options ] [ f=firmwarefile ]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

btcflash is used to read and update the Firmware for a BTC DRW1008 DVD+/-RW recorder. Lowkey niche, highkey important. 🦋

warning bestie: be very careful when writing firmware — this program does not check whether the target device is correct. Like, it will not hold your hand. 😭

🦋 Device naming 🦋

For a list of possible device name parameters, call btcflash -scanbus or btcflash dev=help, then use the right dev= parameter based on the device listing. Slay.

💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -help — prints a short summary of the p options and exits. (The manual really says p options, iykyk.)
• -version — print version information and exit.
• dev=target — set the SCSI target for the CD/DVD/BluRay-Recorder, see the notes above. A typical target device specification is dev=1,6,0. If a filename must be provided together with the numerical target specification, the filename is implementation specific. The correct filename in this case can be found in the system specific manuals of the target operating system. On a FreeBSD system without CAM support, you need to use the control device (e.g. /dev/rcd0.ctl). A correct device specification in this case may be dev=/dev/rcd0.ctl:@. This is the main character option, no cap. 👑

💜 General SCSI addressing 💜

The target device for the dev= option refers to scsibus/target/lun of the CD/DVD/BluRay-Recorder. Communication on SunOS is done with the SCSI general driver scg. Other operating systems are using a library simulation of this driver. Possible syntax is: dev= scsibus,target,lun or dev= target,lun. In the latter case, the CD/DVD/BluRay-Recorder has to be connected to the default SCSI bus of the machine. Scsibus, target and lun are integer numbers. Some operating systems or SCSI transport implementations may require you to specify a filename in addition. In this case the correct syntax for the device is: dev= devicename:scsibus,target,lun or dev= devicename:target,lun. If the name of the device node that has been specified on such a system refers to exactly one SCSI device, a shorthand in the form dev= devicename:@ or dev= devicename:@,lun may be used instead of dev= devicename:scsibus,target,lun.

🧚 Remote SCSI addressing 🧚

To access remote SCSI devices, you need to prepend the SCSI device name by a remote device indicator. The remote device indicator is either REMOTE:user@host: or REMOTE:host:. A valid remote SCSI device name may be: REMOTE:user@host: to allow remote SCSI bus scanning, or REMOTE:user@host:1,0,0 to access the SCSI device at host connected to SCSI bus # 1,target 0, lun 0. In order to allow remote access to a specific host, the rscsi(1) program needs to be present and configured on the host.

⭐ Alternate SCSI transports ⭐

ATAPI drives are just SCSI drives that inherently use the ATA packet interface as a SCSI command transport layer built into the IDE (ATA) transport. You may need to specify an alternate transport layer on the command line if your OS does not implement a fully integrated kernel driver subsystem that allows one to access any drive using SCSI commands via a single unique user interface.

To access SCSI devices via alternate transport layers, you need to prepend the SCSI device name by a transport layer indicator. The transport layer indicator may be something like USCSI: or ATAPI:. To get a list of supported transport layers for your platform, use dev= HELP:.

🌈 Portability Background 🌈

To make btcflash portable to all UNIX platforms, the syntax dev= devicename:scsibus,target,lun is preferred as it hides OS specific knowledge about device names from the user. A specific OS may not necessarily support a way to specify a real device file name nor a way to specify scsibus,target,lun.

Scsibus 0 is the default SCSI bus on the machine. Watch the boot messages for more information or look into /var/adm/messages for more information about the SCSI configuration of your machine. If you have problems figuring out what values for scsibus,target,lun should be used, try the -scanbus option of btcflash described below.

🎀 Using logical names for devices 🎀

If no dev option is present, btcflash will try to get the device from the CDR_DEVICE environment.

If a file /etc/default/cdrecord exists, and if the argument to the dev= option or the CDR_DEVICE environment does not contain the characters ',', '/', '@' or ':', it is interpreted as a device label name that was defined in the file /etc/default/cdrecord (see FILES section).

🦋 Autotarget Mode 🦋

If no dev= option and no CDR_DEVICE environment is present, or if it only contains a transport specifier but no address notation, btcflash tries to scan the SCSI address space for CD-ROM drives. If exactly one is found, this is used by default.

• timeout=# — set the default SCSI command timeout value to # seconds. The default SCSI command timeout is the minimum timeout used for sending SCSI commands. If a SCSI command fails due to a timeout, you may try to raise the default SCSI command timeout above the timeout value of the failed command. If the command runs correctly with a raised command timeout, please report the better timeout value and the corresponding command to the author of the program. If no timeout option is present, a default timeout of 40 seconds is used.
• debug=#, -d — set the misc debug value to # (with debug=#) or increment the misc debug level by one (with -d). If you specify -dd, this equals debug=2. This may help to find problems while opening a driver for libscg, as well as with sector sizes and sector types. Using -debug slows down the process and may be the reason for a buffer underrun.
• kdebug=#, kd=# — tell the scg-driver to modify the kernel debug value while SCSI commands are running.
• -silent, -s — do not print out a status report for failed SCSI commands.
• -v — increment the level of general verbosity by one. This is used e.g. to display the progress of the process.
• -V — increment the verbose level with respect to SCSI command transport by one. This helps to debug problems during the process that occur in the CD-Recorder. If you get incomprehensible error messages, you should use this flag to get more detailed output. -VV will show data buffer content in addition. Using -V or -VV slows down the process.
• f=file — specify the filename where the firmware should be read from.
• -scanbus — scan all SCSI devices on all SCSI busses and print the inquiry strings. This option may be used to find the SCSI address of the devices on a system. The numbers printed out as labels are computed by: bus * 100 + target.
• scgopts=list — a comma separated list of SCSI options that are handled by libscg. The implemented options may be updated independently from applications. Currently, one option: ignore-resid is supported to work around a Linux kernel bug.
• ts=# — set the maximum transfer size for a single SCSI command to #. The syntax for the ts= option is the same as for cdrecord fs=# or sdd bs=#.

If no ts= option has been specified, btcflash defaults to a transfer size of 256 kB. If libscg gets lower values from the operating system, the value is reduced to the maximum value that is possible with the current operating system. Sometimes, it may help to further reduce the transfer size or to enhance it, but note that it may take a long time to find a better value by experimenting with the ts= option.

🍓 EXAMPLES 🍓

No examples are listed in the source for this section. It's giving mysterious. 🕵️

💖 ENVIRONMENT 💖

• RSH — if the RSH environment is present, the remote connection will not be created via rcmd(3) but by calling the program pointed to by RSH. Use e.g. RSH=/usr/bin/ssh to create a secure shell connection.

Note that this forces cdrecord to create a pipe to the rsh(1) program and disallows cdrecord to directly access the network socket to the remote server. This makes it impossible to set up performance parameters and slows down the connection compared to a root initiated rcmd(3) connection.

• RSCSI — if the RSCSI environment is present, the remote SCSI server will not be the program /opt/schily/sbin/rscsi but the program pointed to by RSCSI. Note that the remote SCSI server program name will be ignored if you log in using an account that has been created with a remote SCSI server program as login shell.

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

cdrecord(1), scg(4), rcmd(3), ssh(1).

🌸 NOTES 🌸

No notes are listed in the source for this section, bestie. 🫶

💅 DIAGNOSTICS 💅

okay so when a SCSI command goes wrong, the error message is a whole moment. a typical one looks exactly like this:

btcflash: I/O error. test unit ready: scsi sendcmd: no error
CDB:  00 20 00 00 00 00
status: 0x2 (CHECK CONDITION)
Sense Bytes: 70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0A 00 00 00 00 25 00 00 00 00 00
Sense Key: 0x5 Illegal Request, Segment 0
Sense Code: 0x25 Qual 0x00 (logical unit not supported) Fru 0x0
Sense flags: Blk 0 (not valid)
cmd finished after 0.002s timeout 40s

iconic, right? but what does each line mean? let's break it down bestie 🫶

• line one — the first line is all about how the command traveled. the text after the first colon is the error text for the system call, from the kernel's point of view. it's usually I/O error unless other problems happen. then the next words give a short description of the SCSI command that failed. the rest of the line tells you if there were any problems transporting the command over the SCSI bus. fatal error means it wasn't possible to transport the command at all (i.e. no device present at the requested SCSI address).
• line two — this one prints the SCSI command descriptor block for the failed command.
• line three — here's the info on the SCSI status code the command returned, if the transport of the command succeeds. this is error information straight from the SCSI device.
• line four — a hex dump of the auto request sense information for the command. very hex, very demure ✨
• line five — the error text for the sense key if available, followed by the segment number, which is only valid if the command was a copy command. if the error message isn't directly related to the current command, the text deferred error gets appended.
• line six — the error text for the sense code and the sense qualifier if available. if the type of the device is known, the sense data is decoded from tables in scsierrs.c. the text is followed by the error value for a field replaceable unit.
• line seven — prints the block number related to the failed command plus text for several error flags. heads up: the block number may not be valid 🙈
• line eight — reports the timeout set up for this command and the time the command really needed to complete. the receipts of timing, honestly.

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🐛 BUGS 🐛

none currently known. literally zero. flawless behavior, no cap 💅

got bugs or suggestions? mail them to schilytools@mlists.in-berlin.de or open a ticket at https://codeberg.org/schilytools/schilytools/issues — they will see it, bestie.

the mailing list archive may be found at:

https://mlists.in-berlin.de/mailman/listinfo/schilytools-mlists.in-berlin.de

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

Joerg Schilling and the schilytools project authors. absolute icons, all of them 🌟

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📥 SOURCE DOWNLOAD 📥

the source code for btcflash is included in the schilytools project and may be retrieved from the schilytools project at Codeberg at:

https://codeberg.org/schilytools/schilytools/

the download directory is:

https://codeberg.org/schilytools/schilytools/releases

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and that's the whole page, bestie 🎀 go forth and flash responsibly. this lil masterpiece comes courtesy of Joerg Schilling, dated 2022/10/06, and it lives its best life under the name BTCFLASH(1L) ✨💖