[ale] Karmic failure - missing device - mknod

[Grady Harris]

Another newsletter from the Slow Learners Academy:

I finally upgraded my Ubuntu installation to 9.10 lasty week, figuring
enough time had passed for others to have worked out most problems.
Not so--the thing doesn't know the machine has a DVD drive in it. Pop
in a disk, nothing happens. Click on the cdrom icon that appears in
Nautilus, get the message that no such device exists. Try it different
ways, get variations on the message: "/dev/scd0 does not exist,"
"/dev/sr0 does not exist." I check, sure enough, it doesn't exist. My
first thought is, "Well, then, I'll make it."

 I spent a long while Saturday looking on the Ubuntu forums &
elsewhere for folks having the same problem, & there were many. Lots
of other folks being helpful, but none of the tips worked for me. They
all seemed to be predicated upon the device being there, & it wasn't.
Okay, blunt object time. I made /dev/sr0 w/ touch, changed the group,
set the permissions, created a symbolic link to /dev/scd0, & it
worked. However, comparing it with the other files in dev, noticed it
should be a block file.

Haven't done that before. Is mknod what I should use to create the
device file? Is there a preferred way?