latest feisty kernel can't see hda

[John L Fjellstad]

"Howard Coles Jr." <dhcolesj at gmail.com> writes:

> I don't know, that's why I was asking.  I was assuming, and maybe
> wrongly so because I haven't looked at the man files for it, that it
> would look in the currently mounted root for that info, 

Think about that for a minute. The /dev directory is mounted on a tmpfs,
meaning its content gets erased during each shutdown.  udev is
responsible for populating the directory every time you boot up (and if
you plug in a external device).

If UUID was a static information in /dev, then booting up from a live cd
shouldn't give you the same information. The live cd will have its own
/dev created by its udev.  Heck, unless the information is stored
somewhere else, you wouldn't even get a consistent UUID for the same
device at each boot up.  And if you are storing the info somewhere else,
why not in the file system itself so that no matter where the partition
is mounted, the UUID is consistent.

> I think, and its my
> opinion, UUIDs just confuse people, and they're no more secure that
> /dev/hda, especially considering everyone knows where on root to look!

Neither UUID, nor labels nor device names have anything to do with
security. 

-- 
John L. Fjellstad
web: http://www.fjellstad.org/          Quis custodiet ipsos custodes