UUIDs on drives

[Brian McKee]

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 2:08 AM, Brian Astill <bastill at adam.com.au> wrote:
> On Thursday 14 August 2008 13:48:44 you wrote:
>
>> > If there is a key to unravel the info implicit in /dev/hdb3
>> > (Primary partition on the Slave drive) from its UUID, would
>> > someone please publish it.
>>
>> huh?
> The "old" system tells what drive and what partition it refers to.
> UUID doesn't.  If it did, I would complain MUCH less.

But that's the point.  The drive and partition numbers can and do
change - UUID doesn't.

> partition.  If the install goes well, I need to change fstab so
> it mounts my home directory, rather than the one it set up by
> default.  How, if UUID is all I have to identify it?

UUID is all you need to identify it!  You just put it in the fstab.
Who cares what arbitrary name the disk controller software gave it?

>> Your server world is different from my desktop world.  In my world
> the trend is to fewer, but much larger, drives.  In my world we
> often have a "working" drive, and use the other
> for "experimenting" - changing partitions and usage as desire
> dictates.  For us, UUID seems to present an unnessary barrier.

How many USB keys do you own?  How about external backup drives?
Picture frames with flash memory?  In the desktop world I'm used to
even my wife has multiple 'hard drives' now and she never used to.
The only problem with UUID is the names look so horrible.  They have
to, but it makes them seem mysterious when it's really quite straight
forward.

Brian