A curse on LABEL=

Bryan O'Sullivan bos at serpentine.com
Sat Apr 10 21:57:40 UTC 2004


On Sat, 2004-04-10 at 05:10, Timothy Murphy wrote:

> > Try adding a new SCSI controller to a system that moves all existing SCSI
> > devices.  You will like LABEL then.
> 
> Surely the proportion of users who want to do this is vanishingly small?

Actually, this has nothing to do with SCSI.  The reason for LABEL is so
that people who move stuff around inside their computers (add a new
DVD-ROM drive, add a new hard disk, remove something, whatever) won't
get surprised by their computer failing to boot or find some filesystems
because they didn't know the cabling to device number mappings.

This is a lot more probable in this day and age of Firewire and USB2
drives, which can come and go fleetingly.

The LABEL solution isn't all that great, because it can make things very
confusing if you move a drive from one machine to another and suddenly
end up with two drives labelled "/", but it at least reduces the scope
for messes.  Any more complete solution would require BIOS support,
which isn't there yet.

	<b





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