what kind of /etc/fstab is this?

[Roger Heflin]

Amadeus W.M. wrote:
> On Sun, 25 May 2008 12:18:11 -0400, Todd Zullinger wrote:
> 
>> Amadeus W.M. wrote:
>>> I'm not convinced about the utility of having schizophrenic partition
>>> labels upon install, with no other option. How many people run several
>>> unixes on the same computer? 5% maybe? Then maybe they should be given
>>> the option to have ugly labels, and let the rest of us have pretty
>>> labels by default.
>> The problem has little to do with running other systems.  Even on the
>> same fedora install, the device names are not guaranteed to remain
>> constant.  So either a label or uuid is the safe way to refer to the
>> partition in fstab.  For the installer, uuid is better, since the labels
>> it writes are not really all that unique (LABEL=/ comes up a lot :).
>>
> 
> How can the device names change? You mean if I physically permute the 
> drives? Back in the days of RH 5 the /dev/hda? scheme seemed pretty good.
> At any rate, this is the smallest of nuissances so far in F9.
> 

If the module load order changes, then the devices can move around if you have 
devices on multiple types of controllers.   So if the kernel changes its pci 
search order it changes (and it has changed before from kernel bugs-uuid makes 
things more robust.)

If you add a disk on port 0 and you already had a disk on port 1 then port 0 
would become what was port 1, and port 1 would become the next slot.

If you added a disk on another controller, then things on later controllers 
would move up by 1.

There are a number of ways to get things to move around, the same is true if you 
removed a disk that was earlier in the order, all other disks would move down 1 
causing real issues.

On really large systems that have a lot of disks it gets really ugly, on classic 
unix systems before labels existed I had a habit of putting a filename in the 
root of each filesystem with this sort of information in the filename itself 
just so one could figure out what everything was easily, otherwise when one had 
20+ partitions things were very time consuming to figure out.

                                 Roger