UUIDs on drives (was Hibernate on batery low)

[Derek Broughton]

Kennneth P. Turvey wrote:

> On Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:27:39 +1000, Res wrote:
> 
>> (I hate how they use these uid labels, it seems to have created problems
>> for a few people from reading ubuntuforums, and in here, refer the rsync
>> thread from hrmm, 6 weeks ago(?), most other distros get along fine
>> without crap like this (maybe im just too old school, and old... I dunno
>> <G> )
> 
> I prefer the old method too.  I think the problem is that many people use
> external drives now and the devices will change, so UUIDs solve the
> problem.
> 
> Is this the correct reasoning?  I'm just guessing here.  

Absolutely.  Kernel changes meant that IDE devices changed from
being /dev/hd* to /dev/sd*, and Ubuntu made the decision to prevent that
causing errors by just converting all /etc/fstabs to use UUID before the
change.  People who had no trouble when the device names changed now whine
because UUID doesn't make any sense.

> Are there any 
> other advantages to using UUIDs that I'm missing?
 
No, and LABEL is another option that's much less obscure than UUID, but not
guaranteed to be unique.
-- 
derek