Question about use of multiple USB Mass Storage devices

[Rick Stevens]

Aaron Konstam wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 07:06:22PM -0200, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> 
>>On Dec  8, 2003, "Steven W. Orr" <steveo at syslang.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Is there a way to "set" a particular device to a particular
>>>mountpoint so that (as a user) I could say something like
>>
>>man devlabel
>>
> 
> You certainly mount a device on a partcular mount point but what would
> you expect: man devlabel
> to return?

Alexandre was suggesting you view the man page for "devlabel" by
entering the command "man devlabel".

devlabel creates a symbolic link between the physical device and a
mnemonic name (sort of like the way "/dev/cdrom" points at "/dev/hdb"
or whatever).  It also reads the UUID from the device if it has one (it
creates one otherwise) and puts an entry in the /etc/sysconfig/devlabel
file that it can use later to recreate the symbolic link if the device
name changes (such as would happen if the USB bus changes).

For example, my 750MB USB Zip drive is sometimes /dev/sda and sometimes
/dev/sdb (depending on if my USB FLASH is plugged in).  devlabel has
created a /dev/zip750 mnemonic name for me which is a symlink to either
/dev/sda or /dev/sdb, depending on what the bus looks like.

In the /etc/sysconfig/devtable file, the current link is shown along
with the UUID "S:IOMEGAZIP750", which devlabel can use to find the
device on the next boot.  Regardless of how my stuff is set up, I can
always mount my Zip drive by "mount /dev/zip750 /mnt/zip".

Does that help?
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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-      "Microsoft is a cross between The Borg and the Ferengi.       -
-  Unfortunately they use Borg to do their marketing and Ferengi to  -
-               do their programming."  -- Simon Slavin              -
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