On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 3:49 PM, Timothy J Massey <[email protected]>wrote:
>
> My backup servers have a SATA removable drive tray installed in them. Its
> purpose is to be a target for BackupPC archvies (among other things) that
> allows the user to easily swap these. It is simply a physical tray: the
> system sees the drive inside of the tray exactly the same as any other
> internal SATA drive.
>
> And that's part of my problem. With RHEL 6, I no longer have consistent
> (actually, persisitent) device naming. This system also uses a USB flash
> drive as its boot drive. It seems that there is a race condition during
> bootup. *Most* of the time, the USB device appears after the SATA drives,
> but not always. So, most times my tray shows up as /dev/sdd, but sometimes
> it shows up as /dev/sde. As you can imagine, this causes no end of
> problems with trying to create a script to safely partition and format the
> drive!
>
> The (AFAIK) proper way to correct this is to create a udev rule to assign
> the tray device a persistent device name. However, because it's a
> removable tray, I can't use something like drive UUID or serial number to
> do this: the drive changes. I can't use SCSI path: it's the race
> condition that causes this one to change. And because sometimes the drive
> that I insert will be perfectly blank (a new drive), I can't use something
> like a drive label: it might not have one!
>
> The only thing I *think* I can use is PCI bus address, and I don't know
> how reliable that might be. I don't want some *other* race condition to
> break things.
>
> Does anyone else have any experience in this regard and might either be
> able to either point me in a better direction or give me an example of a
> udev rule that uses PCI address? I've Googled, but everything I can find
> uses things like drive ID or label. I can't find a single example with PCI
> bus address (DEVPATH).
>
Personally, I'd never trust a script to automatically format a disk just
because it is inserted in a certain carrier. Maybe something like making
a small permanent partition with a label or UUID would let you detect it
and figure out the base device if you really have to format
different/larger partition on it in a script. The PCI bus address
shouldn't change unless you move controller cards around, though.
--
Les Mikesell
[email protected]
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