> Date: Thu, 10 Jul 1997 04:20:25 -0400
> From: Jeff Garzik <jeff.garzik@spinne.com>
>
> Solaris is kinda fun to play with, and the guys at Sun occasionally have
> a good idea or two.
>
> One of my biggest Linux pet peeves is having to reshuffle my !@#$@!
> /etc/fstab every time I reshuffle my drives. [I do know about
> Youngdale's tools for this] Running a news server means many SCSI ids,
> many SCSI hosts, and a lot of reshuffling, on into the night...
>
> You think this is bad, life's going to get even more interesting when/if SCAM
> (SCSI Configured Auto-Magically) becomes popular. It's possible for SCSI IDs
> to change after a SCSI bus reset if there are SCAM devices, alas. There's
> apparently no guarantee that the SCSI IDs will get assigned the same way every
> time.
>
> Why, oh why, couldn't they have left well enough alone...
Mainframers figured this one out a long time ago. Label your media, and
extend the connect-media-to-the-filesystem function (mount(8) in our
case) to mount by label content instead of physical location. So your
fstab could look like:
...
none /usr ext2 defaults,l="apps01" 1 1
none /home1 ext2 defaults,l="users00" 1 1
none /home2 ext2 defaults,l="users01" 1 1
...
or maybe:
...
(apps01) /usr ext2 defaults 1 1
(users00) /home1 ext2 defaults 1 1
(users01) /home2 ext2 defaults 1 1
...
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer MWOOD@INDYVAX.IUPUI.EDU
Those who will not learn from history are doomed to reimplement it.