Re: devfs
Mitch Adair (mitch@acan.net)
Fri, 7 Aug 1998 21:33:06 -0500 (CDT)
> > What would you suggest as a smart approach to volume management?
>
> What matters isnt "which physical disk" its "where is the file system that
> used to be /home". So UUID's are ideal for this (volume labelling).
>
> > > And wherehasitgone is a tool to walk the disk tree and find a volume by uuid
> > > and/or maybe ask LDAP/NIS maps to find it via NFS
> >
> > What would this look like in /etc/fstab?
>
> I've no idea. That depends how you add such items to mount. ext2fs includes a
> libuuid and all e2fs file systems have uuids. DOS fs has a serial number on
> each disk, etc.
>
> > P.S. I'm not arguing for devfs per se; simply arguing for a "canonical,
> > never-out-of-date /dev" and "devices named by SCSI id".
>
> Devices named by SCSI ID is IMHO a partial solution. I should be able to
> take put a jaz disk of /home on any jaz drive on the machine and boot the
> system happily. In an ideal world with LDAP or CORBA services running
> I should be able to shove it in any machien on my network
>
> Alan
All of this assumes that what you want back is the /home partition. What
if what you want to know is where target 3 on controller 2 is at boot-up?
(ie I've pulled /u1 from another computer and want to put it in this one,
I don't care about /u1 contents, just where my new disk is now.) With
the current scheme +uuid you get your /home back, but new stuff is
still a crap shoot.
Plus, all the uuid stuff is great if you want to mount ext2fs, it doesn't
help when what you want is to mount the cd number 14 in your cd tower, no
uuid, unfortunately. (Don't mistake me, I'm not knocking uuid at all,
I just think there is still a need for postion based names too. The
combination of the two would solve nearly all problems - all save the
controller positioning, of course...)
Mitch
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